BlackBerry World 2012: A Glimpse into RIM's Future

Much ado about Alpha: RIM CEO Thorsten Heins demos the Dev Alpha developer device that may or may not make it to marketText and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Orlando, FL: Research in Motion's President and CEO Thorsren Heins had his coming out party today and tried to give visitors and developers here in BlackBerry World a feel for where the company was headed. BlackBerry 10, the unified tablet and smartphone OS that was officially launched here was previewed briefly on the new developer Alpha devices which are slate-smartphones that resemble Apple's iPhone 4 but which take all of their materials, design and features from the BlackBerry PlayBook.

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SlideShow: BlackBerry World 2012 Day One

Here are some of the events and festivities here in Orlando for BlackBerry World 2010. There were various solutions and demonstrations during the opening evening of this conference. Stay tuned for our coverage of tomorrow's keynote event.

BlackBerry 10 Development Device appears, looks a lot like a mini PlayBook

We're just a day away from BlackBerry World 2012 and BlackBerry Jam in Orlando (stay tuned for our live reports starting tomorrow afternoon) and there's already a photo of the BlackBerry 10 development device which RIM is expected to seed to lucky developers. More images of the device can be seen at CrackBerry.com. 

If this is indeed a real device and not a clevery Photoshopped hoax, it looks like a multi-touch slate (no physical keyboard!) that has borrowed freely from the materials and design of the PlayBook. It looks sturdy and reasonably rugged. It also appears to have a front facing camera and a rear camera with an LED flash. Other than that, it is hard to tell what this thing can do or how the QNX OS will look on it. I'm crossing my fingers that we will see a preview in the coming days.

RIM shares some BlackBerry app and developer milestones

Research in Motion is sharing some good news focusing on developer and app adoption for the PlayBook as well as for current generation smartphones. RIM's been getting a lot of heat lately due to continuing losses and its struggle to compete with current smartphones and services. We'd like to give them a bit of credit for being able to generate some excitement from the developer community and bring more apps to their platform while preparing their next generation devices. Hit jump to read more.

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