The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem

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BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]






BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]


This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.


Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.


And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News




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Lindsay Lohan's Day in Court: We Put Her Style on Trial

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Style News Now





01/30/2013 at 02:00 PM ET











Lindsay Lohan Court OutfitSplash News Online (2)


By now, we’re sort of used to Lindsay Lohan‘s antics, but it seems that we’ll never get accustomed to her unusual outfit choices. Case in point: the two very different (but equally eyebrow-raising) styles she sported within 12 hours this week.


First up, Lohan traveled from N.Y.C. to L.A.Tuesday night in an ensemble that has never been worn before on a plane — and with good reason. From her billowy leather trousers to her fur-trimmed leather jacket, we can’t imagine a stiffer, sweatier travel ensemble. Add a floppy brown hat and you’ve got a look that’s very Indiana-Jones-meets-Kim-Kardashian.


Then she showed up (on time!) to her probation violation pretrial hearing in L.A. on Wednesday morning in an outfit that mixed a courtroom-ready dress with a nightclub-ready heel. A marked improvement from her leather look, but still completely inappropriate for the situation.


The star has six weeks to come up with a better outfit (her trial date is March 18), and we’d be happy to assist in any way we can. Lindsay: call us! Tell us: What would you do to fix Lohan’s style?


PHOTOS: TELL US WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT MORE QUESTIONABLE STAR STYLE!




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APNewsBreak: EPA moves to ban some rodent poisons

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to ban the sale of a dozen rat and mouse poisons sold under the popular D-Con brand in an effort to protect children and pets.


The agency said Wednesday it hopes to reduce the thousands of accidental exposures that occur every year from rodent-control products. Children and pets are at risk for exposure because the products typically are placed on floors.


The agency had targeted a handful of companies two years ago, saying they needed to develop new products that are safer for children, pets and wildlife. All but Reckitt Benckiser Inc., manufacturer of D-Con, did so.


The company will have at least 30 days to request a hearing before an administrative law judge. If no hearing is requested, the ban will take effect.


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Manti Te'o hoax suspect 'in love' with football star

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The man accused of hoaxing Manti Te’o fell “deeply romantically
in love” with the Notre Dame linebacker and said he was “confused” about his
sexuality, TV’s Dr. Phil McGraw told the "Today" show in a clip that aired Wednesday.


The Antelope Valley man, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, 22, is allegedly the person behind the Te’o fake-girlfriend affair. He is planning to
come clean and reveal the exact nature of his relationship with the football
player and his role in the hoax during an interview with McGraw to be aired Thursday, his
attorney, Milton Grimes, told The Times.


Grimes said Tuiasosopo was acting
when he portrayed "Lennay Kekua," the woman with whom Te’o said he
had fallen in love with, but never met. Grimes said his client pretended to be
the woman in phone calls with the football star, disguising his voice to sound
like a woman, similar to what people do when they are role-playing or method
acting.


"I don’t think it’s so unusual
that a person could imitate the voice of a person of a different sex,"
Grimes said.


In a short clip of that interview
obtained by The Times, McGraw asks Tuiasosopo why he ended his relationship
with Te’o.


“For many reasons,” Tuiasosopo said. “There were many times where Manti and Lennay
had broken up before.... They would break up, and then something would bring
them back together, whether it was something going on in his life or something
going in Lennay’s life -- in this case, in my life. I wanted to end it, because
after everything I had gone through, I finally realized that I just had to move
on with my life. I had to get me, Ronaiah. I had to start just living and just
let this go.”


Grimes, the onetime lawyer for the
late Rodney King, said Tuiasosopo "feels as though he needs therapy and part of that therapy
is to ... tell the truth."


McGraw told "Today" that “Ronaiah
had a number of life experiences that damaged this young man in some very
serious ways,” and after speaking with Tuiasosopo, he believes that Te’o "absolutely, unequivocally" was not involved in the hoax.


Grimes insisted his client didn't
mean to hurt Te'o.


"He did not intend to harm him
in any way," Grimes said.


Te'o had spoken to reporters
repeatedly about his supposed girlfriend and her battle with cancer, a story
that captivated college football fans throughout fall 2012, when the
Heisman Trophy runner-up helped his team finish out the regular season undefeated and helped get them to
the national championship game.


A Deadspin.com report published Jan. 16 first
revealed that the girlfriend was fake, and identified Tuiasosopo as the man
behind the hoax.


Grimes said Tuiasosopo had chosen
Dr. Phil for his first public appearance because he felt that as a medical
professional, Dr. Phil "might be inclined to have better insight [than a
regular reporter] into what he’s going through ... the particular
condition," Grimes said.


Diane O'Meara, a Southern California
woman whose photos were apparently used in the fake girlfriend's social media
accounts, told The Times that Tuiasosopo repeatedly asked for photos and videos
from her in the weeks before the hoax unraveled. She called his actions
"kind of annoying," but added, "as a compassionate person, I
totally believed him."


Grimes said he had warned his
client, who is seeing a medical professional, that he could face legal
consequences for admitting that he falsified his identity on the Internet. But
Tuiasosopo insisted that going public was something he had to do in order to
move on with his healing process.


"His point is that he wants to
heal," Grimes said. "He knows that if he doesn’t come out and tell
the truth, it will interfere with him getting out of this place that he is
in."


"This is part of my public
healing," Grimes quoted Tuiasosopo as saying.


ALSO:


Listen to Lennay Kekua’s voicemails for Manti Te’o


Lance Armstrong and Manti Te'o get trapped in a good story


Manti Te'o hoax: Diane O'Meara says she was hounded for photos


--Matt Stevens, Kate Mather and Ann Simmons 



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The Lede Blog: Under Attack, Cairo Hotel Sends Twitter SOS

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Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel broadcast live on Egypt’s ONTV early Tuesday.

Last Updated, 2:56 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.

Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, broadcast live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry. Coming at the same time as violence in cities on the Suez Canal, this week’s unrest threatened two of the main pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.

Within an hour of sounding the alarm on the social network, the staff reported on Twitter that the security forces had arrived.

Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.

An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.”

This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling for days on the street outside the hotel prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.

Another Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.

Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.

Nabila Samak, a spokeswoman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, after appeals to the security forces for protection went unanswered.

Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.” Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.

A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.

In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.”

Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.

In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hands.” The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.”

Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.

Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.

The luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airways, did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but an executive in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.”

Although the hotel then announced that it would be closed for security reasons, the staff posted another urgent plea for help on Twitter late Tuesday.

Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim in Cairo.

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Two New Breeds to Compete at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

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01/29/2013 at 03:00 PM EST







Treeing Walker Coonhound and a Russell Terrier


Astrid Stawiarz/Getty


Looks like there will be some new furry faces at this year's Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

The American Kennel Club recently announced the inclusion of two new breeds for the 2013 competition, the Russell Terrier and the Treeing Walker Coonhound.

Per a description on Westminster's official site, new breeds are considered for addition when they've reached a significant number and distribution across the United States, as well as when a breed's parent club shows a growing interest.

Praised for being "athletic, intelligent, and fiercely loyal, the Russell Terrier is well-regarded for its hunting abilities, while the Treeing Walker Coonhound – bred to track and tree wild raccoons, hence its name – takes pride in its "clear, ringing bugle voice" and "intelligent, confident and sociable" nature.

Before these new breeds take their first bow at the show, to be held on Feb. 11 and 12 in New York City, tell us: Will you be watching?

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Soldier looks forward to driving with new arms

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BALTIMORE (AP) — A soldier who lost all four limbs in a roadside bombing in Iraq says he's looking forward to driving and swimming with new arms after undergoing a double-arm transplant.


"I just want to get the most out of these arms, and just as goals come up, knock them down and take it absolutely as far as I can," Brendan Marrocco said Tuesday.


The 26-year-old New Yorker spoke at a news conference at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was joined by surgeons who performed the operation.


After he was wounded, Marrocco said, he felt fine using prosthetic legs, but he hated not having arms.


"You talk with your hands, you do everything with your hands, basically, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," he said.


Marrocco said his chief desire is to drive the black Dodge Charger that's been sitting in his garage for three years.


"I used to love to drive," he said. "I'm really looking forward to just getting back to that, and just becoming an athlete again."


Although he doesn't expect to excel at soccer, his favorite sport, Marrocco said he'd like to swim and compete in a marathon using a handcycle.


Marrocco joked that military service members sometimes regard themselves as poorly paid professional athletes. His good humor and optimism are among the qualities doctors cited as signs he will recover much of his arm and hand use in two to three years.


"He's a young man with a tremendous amount of hope, and he's stubborn — stubborn in a good way," said Dr. Jaimie Shores, the hospital's clinical director of hand transplantation. "I think the sky's the limit."


Shores said Marrocco has already been trying to use his hands, although he lacks feeling in the fingers, and he's eager to do more as the slow-growing nerves and muscles mend.


"I suspect that he will be using his hands for just about everything as we let him start trying to do more and more. Right now, we're the ones really kind of holding him back at this point," Shores said.


The procedure was only the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant ever done in the United States.


The infantryman was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He is the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War.


Marrocco also received bone marrow from the same donor to minimize the medicine needed to prevent rejection. He said he didn't know much about the donor but "I'm humbled by their gift."


The 13-hour operation on Dec. 18 was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Hopkins.


Marrocco was being released from the hospital Tuesday but will receive intensive therapy for two years at Hopkins and then at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.


After a major surgery, human nerves regenerate at a rate of an inch per month, Lee said.


"The progress will be slow, but the outcome will be rewarding," he added.


___


Associated Press Writer David Dishneau contributed to this story from Hagerstown, Md.


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Woman who drowned autistic son gets prison time

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Autism
A 37-year-old San Diego woman who told police she killed her son because of the burden of caring for an autistic child was sentenced Monday to 15 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.


Patricia Corby drowned her 4-year-old son, Daniel, in the family bathtub March 31 while her husband was at work, according to evidence submitted in court.


"I hate you with all my heart and soul," Duane Corby told the woman before San Diego County Superior Court Judge Charles Gill sentenced her for the death of the boy.


After killing her son, she tried to commit suicide but failed, according to evidence.


She wrapped the boy in a blanket and took his lifeless body to a police substation responsible for their Carmel Valley neighborhood.


Under Gill's sentence, Corby will not be eligible for a reduced sentence due to good behavior while in prison. Corby's husband told investigators that he had never seen any signs of mental illness in his wife.


The family had spent $70,000 trying to find help for their son, according to evidence in court.


Corby kept her head bowed in court as relatives told the judge about the pain caused by the boy's death, including an aunt who said the boy is probably looking down from heaven and asking, "Mama, why did you kill me?"


ALSO:


Manti Te'o hoax: Diane O'Meara says she was hounded for photos


Latino kids disproportionately victimized by teachers, lawyer says


Frank Ocean wants Chris Brown prosecuted in clash over parking spot

-- Tony Perry in San Diego


Photo: Patricia Corby at arraignment. Credit: Fox-5 San Diego




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The Lede Blog: Images of New Clashes in Egypt, Two Years After the Revolution's 'Day of Rage'

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Last Updated, 2:47 p.m. This post has been updated throughout the day with reports from bloggers and journalists in Egypt, where protests and clashes continued in major cities despite an attempt to impose emergency rule.

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports from Egypt, there were protests in the Suez Canal city of Port Said and fresh clashes in Cairo on Monday.

Video uploaded to YouTube on Sunday showed officers firing at protesters in Port Said, killing four, including a man in a wheelchair, according to Mosireen, a collective of activist Egyptian filmmakers.

Video said to show Egyptian police officers firing at protesters in the Suez Canal city of Port Said on Sunday.

As clashes continued in Port Said on Monday, despite a declaration of martial law, journalists and bloggers there uploaded video of angry chants against the government at funerals for protesters and reports of escalating mayhem.

Video said to show the funeral of protesters killed in Port Said, Egypt on Monday.

In Cairo, police fired tear gas on Sunday and Monday at protesters at the foot of the Kasr el-Nile bridge near Tahrir Square, which was the scene of an epic battle during the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak exactly two years ago, on what was known as the revolution’s “Day of Rage.”

The activist blogger Omar Kamel shared dramatic photographs and video of the clashes by the bridge on Sunday, showing clouds of tear gas in front of the luxury hotels along the Nile Corniche illuminated by the protesters’ fireworks and lasers.

Video of clashes along the Nile Corniche in Cairo on Sunday night, posted online by Omar Kamel, an activist filmmaker.

The Egyptian newspaper El Watan uploaded video of clashes in the same area on Monday.

Video on clashes in Cairo on Monday, from hte Egyptian news site El Watan.

The Cairene blogger who writes as Kikhote uploaded video shot from above Tahrir Square on Monday that zoomed in to the foot of the Kasr el-Nil bridge, showing the location of the bridge and what looked like hundreds of protesters gathered there.

Video shot from above Tahrir Square on Monday showed the location of clashes at Kasr el-Nil bridge nearby.

Kikhote also drew attention to the activist blogger Rasha Azab’s photograph of a cloud of tear gas in the air above the heads of protesters near the foot of the bridge on Monday, in front of the distinctive salmon-colored facade of the Cairo Semiramis hotel.

Tarek Shalaby, another activist blogger, reported on Twitter that a couple of hundred protesters remained on the bridge, with dozens of officers from the Central Security Forces on the Corniche nearby, at about 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon.

A short time later, my colleague Kareem Fahim reported from the bridge that tear gas was being fired at protesters on the Cornche.

At abut 5 p.m. local time, Jonathan Rashad, a photographer, reported on Twitter that the officers had pushed protesters back from the Cornche on to the bridge and into Tahrir Square.

About two hours later, the Egyptian journalists Mohamed Abdelfattah and Simon Hanna reported from the Corniche that a protest march coming from the other direction had broken through the police lines just down the street from the Semiramis, and, after some fighting, the protesters captured a senior officer outside another luxury hotel, the Kempinski.

Witnesses also said that the protesters then took control of one police armored personnel carrier, driving it to Tahrir Square, and set fire to another.

At about 8 p.m. local time the A.P.C. that was driven into Tahrir Square by protesters was also on fire, as video posted online by the blogger Kikhote showed.

Video of an armored personnel carrier ablaze in Tahrir Square on Monday night.

As the 9 p.m. curfew imposed on Port Said approached, Rawya Rageh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera English, reported from the city that thousands of protesters had taken to the streets to defy the order — including the local soccer club’s most hardcore fans, the ultras, who were blamed for a deadly riot last year.

A blogger named Sameh Abd El-Khalek uploaded photographs to Twitter of what he said was the protest march on Monday night.

As the Egyptian blogger who writes as The Big Pharaoh noted, live television images also showed thousands of protesters breaking the 9 p.m. curfew in the city of Suez.

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Crucial, long-overdue BlackBerry makeover arrives

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TORONTO (AP) — The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedy browser, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone, the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company.


Thorsten Heins, chief executive of Research In Motion Ltd., will reveal the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York on Wednesday. Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple’s trend-setting iPhone and Google’s Android-driven devices.






Now, there’s some optimism. Previews of the software have gotten favorable reviews on blogs. Financial analysts are starting to see some slight room for a comeback. RIM‘s stock has nearly tripled to about $ 16.30 from a nine-year low in September, though it’s still nearly 90 percent below its 2008 peak of $ 147.


Most analysts consider a BlackBerry 10 success to be crucial for the company’s long-term viability.


“The old models are becoming obsolete quickly,” BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said. “There is still a big user base but it’s going to rotate off. The question is: Where do they rotate to?”


The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, has been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people. Corporate information-technology managers like the phones because they’re relatively secure and easy to manage.


The BlackBerry has also crossed over to consumers. President Barack Obama couldn’t bear to part with it when he took office. Oprah Winfrey declared it one of her “favorite things.” People got so addicted that the device was nicknamed “the CrackBerry.”


But when the iPhone came out in 2007, it showed that phones can do much more than email and phone calls. They can play games, music and movies. Android came along to offer even more choices. Though IT managers still love BlackBerrys, employees were bringing their own devices to the workplace — a trend Heins acknowledged RIM was slow to adapt to.


Suddenly, the BlackBerry looked ancient.


Even as BlackBerry sales continued to grow in many parts of the world, many BlackBerry users in North America switched to iPhones and Android devices. BlackBerry’s worldwide subscriber based peaked at 80 million in the quarter that ended Sept. 1, before dropping to 79 million in the most-recent quarter. In the U.S., according to research firm IDC, shipments of BlackBerry phones plummeted from 46 percent of the market in 2008 to 2 percent in 2012.


RIM promised a new system to catch up, using technology it got through its 2010 purchase of QNX Software Systems. RIM initially said BlackBerry 10 would come by early 2012, but then the company changed that to late 2012. A few months later, that date was pushed further, to early 2013, missing the lucrative holiday season. The holdup helped wipe out more than $ 70 billion in shareholder wealth and 5,000 jobs.


Although executives have been providing a glimpse at some of BlackBerry 10′s new features for months, Heins will finally showcase a complete system at Wednesday’s event. Devices will go on sale soon after that.


RIM redesigned the system to embrace the multimedia, apps and touch-screen experience prevalent today.


“Historically there have been areas that have not been our strongest points,” Rick Costanzo, RIM’s executive vice president of global sales, said in an interview. “Not only have we caught up, but we may even be better than some of the competition now.”


Costanzo said “no one else can touch” what RIM’s new system offers.


The new operating system promises better multitasking than either the iPhone or Android. Simply swipe a finger across the phone’s display screen to switch to another program.


All emails and notifications from such applications as Twitter and Facebook go to the BlackBerry Hub, a nerve center accessible with a finger swipe even if you have another application open. One can peek into it and open an email, or return to the previous application without opening the email.


“You are not going in and out of applications; you’re flowing through applications with one simple gesture of your finger,” Costanzo said. “You can leave applications running. You can effortlessly flow between them. So that’s completely unique to us.”


That said, multitasking will be limited and won’t allow for extensive use of apps side by side, as is typically permitted on traditional computers. If you’re watching a video, it will still run while you check for email. But it will pause if you decide to open an email and resume when you are done.


The BlackBerry’s touch-screen keyboard promises to learn a user’s writing style and suggest words and phrases to complete, going beyond typo corrections offered by rivals. See the one you want, and flick it up to the message area. Costanzo said that “BlackBerry offers the best keyboard, period.”


Gus Papageorgiou, a Scotiabank financial analyst who has tried it out, agreed with that assessment and said the keyboard even learns and adjusts to your thumb placements.


The first BlackBerry 10 phone will have only a touch screen. RIM has said it will release a version with a physical keyboard soon after that. That’s an area RIM has excelled at, and it’s one reason many BlackBerry users have remained loyal despite temptations to switch.


Another distinguishing feature will be the BlackBerry Balance, which allows two personas on the same device. Businesses can keep their data secure without forcing employees to get a second device for personal use. For instance, IT managers can prevent personal apps from running inside corporate firewalls, but those managers won’t have access to personal data on the device.


With Balance, “you can just switch from work to personal mode,” Papageorgiou said. “I think that is something that will attract a lot of people.”


RIM is also claiming that the BlackBerry 10′s browser will be speedy, even faster than browsers for laptop and desktop computers. According to Papageorgiou, early, independent tests between the BlackBerry 10 and the iPhone support that claim.


Regardless of BlackBerry 10′s advances, though, the new system will face a key shortcoming: It won’t have as many apps written by outside companies and individuals as the iPhone and Android. RIM has said it plans to launch BlackBerry 10 with more than 70,000 apps, including those developed for RIM’s PlayBook tablet, first released in 2011. Even so, that’s just a tenth of what the iPhone and Android offer. Papageorgiou said the initial group will include the most popular ones such as Twitter and Facebook. But RIM will have to persuade others to make a BlackBerry version, when they are already struggling to keep up with both the iPhone and Android.


Like many analysts, Papageorgiou recently upgraded RIM’s stock, but cautions that longtime BlackBerry users will have to get used to a whole new operating system.


He said RIM can be successful if about a third of current subscribers upgrade and if the company can get 4 million new users overseas, especially in countries where the BlackBerry has remained popular. IDC said smartphone shipments grew 44 percent in 2012. If those trends continue, it will be possible for the BlackBerry to grow even if iPhone and Android users don’t switch.


“This doesn’t have to be the best smartphone on the planet to be a success for RIM,” he said. “I think the big question though is, if it fails, is it just too late? Are the other two ecosystems just so advanced that no one can catch up? That’s a big risk.”


Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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