BlackBerry Optimistic With Global Release of Z10

Initial sales of the BlackBerry Z10 reports are encouraging signs for the Canadian company. The BlackBerry Z10 is already on sale in 21 countries including South Africa, India, Germany and the United Kingdom. The Z10 will be released in the United States in late March. This is due largely to the longer testing period of American carriers. In the US, AT&T and Verizon will sell both Z10 and Q10 models, while T-Mobile USA will only sell the Z10, and Sprint has committed to selling only the Q10.

What’s in the BlackBerry Z10?

The Z10 is a completely new smartphone and the company’s first with a touch screen interface. The Q10 with the traditional keyboard will be released later in the year. The Z10 is also the company’s first smartphone running on BlackBerry 10, a Unix-based operating system.

According to Thorstein Heins, co-CEO of BlackBerry, the company shipped five days worth of inventory to India which were sold out just two days after it was launched. He also noted that most of the buyers of the high-end smartphone already owned smartphones from Android and Apple.

BlackBerry Z10 is laden with apps

During the past year, BlackBerry has been trying to round up developers to create apps for the new OS. Even while the BlackBerry 10 and the Z10 were still under development, the developers had their hands on pre-release versions in order to create software. This approach helped ensure that there would be more than 70,000 apps tested and ready for use by the end of January, and a total of 100,000 by the end of March.

Among the 70,000 apps on the BlackBerry World inventory are several ports from Android. In January, 2012, BlackBerry announced that with just a few tweaks it would be possible for Android apps to run on BlackBerry 10 phones. The announcement also mentioned that the tweaks would have to be done by the developers, and that not all Android apps could be that easily ported to the new OS. The number of BlackBerry 10 apps when it was launched is more than that of any first-generation smartphone OS.

Prior to the release of the new OS, BlackBerry ranked third in the smartphone market. It had a 4.5% share of the market in 2012, down from 10.3% in 2011. The new OS was revamped in 2012 to enable the company to compete with Android and iOS in terms of functions, features, apps and performance. Since its inception, BlackBerry’s strength has been in email and in its proprietary instant messaging system, the BlackBerry Messenger.