Blackberry is attempting to re-emerge as a viable competitor to Apple’s iPhone. The company’s new smartphone line is seeking to take a bite out of the stalwarts of the smartphone industry with the new z10 and q10 devices.

On Jan. 31, Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins made three substantial announcements: the release of the new smartphone line, a new mobile operating system and a new company name: “Blackberry.”

It has been 18 months since the last Blackberry operating system release. The delayed launch of Blackberry 10 was mainly due to the fact that the company needed to recuperate after suffering market failure for its previous phones, according to a Feb. 1 NV News article.

According to Google Finance, the stock price of Blackberry has dropped from a high of  $144 a share in 2008 to a present-day low of $16.

While Blackberry claims it will be competing in the consumer arena, it is more feasible for the Blackberry 10 to become more of a force in the enterprise sector, according to the article.

College students may not be able to take full advantage of all of Blackberry’s new features, mainly because Blackberry Balance, a corporate feature, will only be helpful to those who are a part of a corporation. This feature allows companies to subset the phone to accommodate specific settings and applications for corporate-use only, according to the article.

The new phones are targeted at both enterprise users and traditional consumers. The updated video and camera capabilities are designed to resonate with consumers, while the highly customizable enterprise functions are supposed to please information technology managers, according to a Feb. 11 Computerworld article.

Blackberry has re-engineered its user experience by incorporating several new gesture-based navigation tools, according to a Feb. 11 article in Wired magazine. Unlocking the phone now requires a simple swipe from the bottom of the screen to the top. Multitasking in Blackberry 10 allows users to drag onscreen applications upward in order to keep them running in the background. The flow of the new interface is fast, and doesn’t lag even when running several applications at once, according to the article.

Perhaps the most significant improvement from the previous Blackberrys and other smartphones is the new auto-complete keyboard. As the user types, completed words appear just above certain letters. These letters can be dragged upward to complete the predicted word. Many users admit there is a steep learning curve in order to utilize all of the features accordingly, according to Wired.

Smartphones today are often defined by their selection of applications in their designated app store. Top smartphone operating systems iOS and Android both boast more than 700,000 applications for their devices. Blackberry 10 will be launching with just more than 70,000 applications. Applications such as Temple Run, Pinterest and Spotify are notably missing at this time, according to a Nov. 1 Mashable article.

Published on February 11, 2013 at 11:58 pm

Contact Jared: jmrose03@syr.edu