And now we wait for BlackBerry 10

It’s going to be a long few months. This week RIM unveiled the first official details of their BlackBerry 10 platform, and for a day or two all eyes were on them. Investors apparently weren’t impressed, but that’s understandable. Basically, unless RIM had a feature that would brush your teeth and scrub your nether regions, investors weren’t going to be impressed. But observers seemed to take a liking to the new interface that BlackBerry 10 offers. It was enough to get almost any BlackBerry fan excited for the eventual release. I’ll keep this short, since everyone seemed to opine on the big BlackBerry news this week. In fact, it was the general tenor of the opinions out there that has me optimistic. There weren’t many people unimpressed with what they saw. Most outlets held back their opinions, of course, because all we saw were slides of BlackBerry 10 and a developer phone that doesn’t quite run the full OS. But reading through posts from Engadget, CNET, and The Verge, it definitely seems as though RIM has a fighting chance to win some fans with BB10. In fact, the only negative report I read came from a site that I’m sick of citing. BGR, of course, trashed RIM. But that’s nothing new. A BlackBerry fan up until the original Bold 9000, The Boy Genius has turned on RIM in particularly vitriolic fashion. He’s not hesitant to print anonymous ramblings, and he seemingly jumps behind all of them. So there was little surprise when he claimed that RIM is dead anyway. It’s been the MO of him and his operation for quite some time now. (It should be noted that The Boy Genius himself admits that RIM did not provide his operation with a BlackBerry Dev Alpha model. And why would they? He’s railed against them using anonymous sources for over a year now. Why do favors for someone who prints such scathing remarks without a shred of credibility?) I don’t want to get too excited for the new BlackBerry platform, but as is clear, it’s too late for that. Maybe they won’t convince the hordes of iPhone and Android users that their platform is better. But they will convince some people. And for us, BlackBerry 10 can be something new, from something old that we love.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.