Today, Research In Motion kicked off BlackBerry Jam Americas 2012 in San Jose, California. Addressing a crowd of over 1500 developers and community leaders, CEO Thorsten Heins previewed additional elements of the BlackBerry 10 user experience, and provided an overview of how RIM is delivering on the company’s vision for BlackBerry 10.
During the keynote, Thorsten Heins provided a more in-depth look at some of the core features that we’ll be delivering with BlackBerry 10, including BlackBerry Flow and the BlackBerry Hub.
- BlackBerry Flow delivers a new, unique user experience for total integration across all apps.
- With all notifications going to the BlackBerry Hub, customers stay connected with ease and move quickly through tasks.
- With BlackBerry 10 there’s no need to jump in and out of an app to complete a task.
- Customers can immediately see, gather and then share information, naturally and seamlessly flowing through the platform.
Noting the strong momentum behind BlackBerry 10 and continued progress to launch, Heins said, “BlackBerry users will be able to do more, enjoy more and live more…. We have elegantly woven together mobile life by bringing together communications, the internet, people and events, multimedia, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and even more, to give users immediate access to the information they need and want. And then we gave them the ability to take action on that information.”
Other key information shared during today’s keynote includes:
- We have grown our user base to approximately 80 million (up from 78 million at the end of Q2FY2012).
- Our position in social communications is strong with 60 million BBM subscribers and 60 million users of our Facebook app.
- BlackBerry 10 is on track for launch in the first quarter of calendar 2013 — our sales force is getting ready, beta devices are in testing, carrier lab entries are starting next month and some top enterprises are already beta testing BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10.
Heins concluded his portion of the keynote by saying “We are convinced this platform will shape the next 10 years as profoundly and as positively as BlackBerry shaped the last decade. To do that, we are listening. We are focused. We are excited about our future.”
Stayed tuned for further updates from the show.