BlackBerry has appointed Sunil Lalwani as the new managing director for India region. With the appointment, Lalvani will be responsible for overseeing and driving the overall business strategy and growth for BlackBerry in India.

Sunil Lalvani has been appointed in the place of Sunil Dutt, who had put in his papers about two months back. Lalvani has over 20 years of experience in the telecom sales and networking sector and had been associated with BlackBerry since 2009, spearheading enterprise sales in India prior to his appointment as managing director.

Commenting on his appointment, Lalvani said, “BlackBerry is driving the adoption of its next generation of mobile computing platform with BlackBerry 10, and India is a key market for growth of the powerful platform.  As I take up this new role, our focus will be to drive differentiated solutions for consumers and enterprise customers in India, providing a unique mobility experience that harnesses the full range of the BlackBerry offering.”

Prior to joining BlackBerry in 2009, he worked at various senior level positions with leading IT companies including Cisco, Nokia, SITA-Equant, and Global Telesystems in networking and telecom sales to enterprise customers in India.

BlackBerry Z10 has worked liked a breath of fresh air for the Canadian company selling a million devices since its launch back in January. Now the folks at @BB10leaks have posted a set of screenshots from a presentation showing a sort of roadmap for all the products BlackBerry plans to launch this year.

The screenshots show a timeline with BlackBerry products including the Z10 and the Q10 listed under the months they were launched in. According to the slides, after the aforementioned products, BlackBerry plans to launch what looks like a BlackBerry 10 tablet sometime in Q3 followed by a large-screened phablet codenamed the U10 sometime in the late Q4 and then a potential successor to the Q10 with a slightly larger screen codenamed the R10 sometime early next year.

It is difficult to say just how authentic these images might be and should be taken with a pinch of salt. But it they are indeed true, we might see some pretty exciting products from BlackBerry this year.

BlackBerry has announced that it has shipped 1 million Z10 smartphones in the last quarter globally. Overall, the company announced that it had shipped 6 million devices globally, out of which 1 million were Z10s. Additionally, former CEO and co-founder Mike Lazaridis has also announced that he will be leaving the BlackBerry board after completing the successful launch of BlackBerry 10 starting May 1.

He said “With the launch of BlackBerry 10, I believe I have fulfilled my commitment to the Board. I believe I am leaving the company in good hands.”

Current CEO Thorsten Heins said “I admire Mike for his many achievements and for his vision in helping bring BlackBerry 10 to fruition. On a personal level, I am grateful to Mike for his help, guidance and advice during my first 15 months as CEO of BlackBerry. I wish him all the best.”

Overall BlackBerry reported a small operating profit of $94 million on revenue of $2.7 billion. More disturbingly, it was revealed that BlackBerry lost 3 million users in last quarter to 76 million from 79 million in Q4 of 2012.

The buzz around the newly launched BlackBerry Z10 has barely died, when in a chat with Bloomberg, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins revealed that the Canadian company is set to release less expensive phones running on the BB10 OS later this year.

These devices will be specifically targeted at the low-cost markets in the Asia-Pacific region that includes India. But at the same time he also made it clear that these devices though less expensive, won’t be too cheap. BlackBerry won’t play in the $50-$60 market. This piece of news will be welcomed with open arms by the huge number of people especially in India who were impressed with the new BB10 OS on the Z10, but were disappointed that they couldn’t afford the smartphone priced at Rs 43,490.

Heins also expressed his surprise at how well the BlackBerry Z10 has done in the Indian market despite many feeling that the device was priced too high. He also mentioned that the retailers in India had sold out most of the Z10 stocks within two days of launch.

Along with the full-touch Z10, BlackBerry will be launching the Q10 that has a physical QWERTY keypad sometime in May. While the company remains zipped about the pricing or exact specifications of the device, we went hands-on with it. Read on to find our my impressions of the Q10.

Most existing BlackBerry users I know are waiting for the Q10 just because of the physical QWERTY keypad. Can’t blame them really, especially after BlackBerry’s past record with full-touch smartphones in its Storm and Torch series. It surprised me a bit when BlackBerry did not launch the Q10 along with the Z10, though it now seems we would see its unveiling at the company’s annual BlackBerry Live event in May.

I spent some time playing with the Q10 and the device left me pretty impressed. The software was not final but it is clear that it will run a customised version of BlackBerry 10 for devices with physical QWERTY keypads.

The thing that impressed me the most was the Q10′s build quality. It not only looks but feels premium too. While the rest of the world is going with cheap plastic finish, the Q10 is a mixture of glass, metal trimmings (no faux metal here!) and premium plastic finish on the back. From the looks of it, the Q10 is also going to be a high-end device and will replace the Bold 9900. The physical keypad is typical BlackBerry Bold quality, which would please most loyalists. Check out my quick hands-on video below.

Photographs: Ashish Bhatia

Following yesterday’s unveiling of the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha C at the BlackBerry Jam Europe show; app developers have another cause to rejoice. BlackBerry is set to upgrade the Android runtime on BlackBerry 10 (BB10) from Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread to newer versions and eventually support Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, reports Crackberry.

Android runtime allows developers to re-package Android apps to be used on the BlackBerry platform, so what this update essentially means is that developers will now be able to port newer versions of Android apps to BB10. This should allow developers to port more apps from Android and there also should be a marked difference in the whole user experience as a majority of the apps were updated post Android 3.0, wherein Google introduced the Holo theme language into the OS.

There is currently no time frame as to when the runtime will be upgraded to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Image Credit: Crackberry

Read

After announcing the BlackBerry Z10 two days ago, BlackBerry is really impressing with the speed at which it has managed to release the device to the market. The device is already on sale in the UK and we were lucky enough to manage to get a few unboxing shots of spanking new BlackBerry Z10 brandished in white.

For those who don’t know, the Z10 features a 4.2-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280×768 pixels converting to 356 PPI, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, a 8-megapixel camera with cool Time-Shift capabilities, a 2-megapixel front camera, 16GB of internal memory, a microSD card slot and a removable 1,800 mAh battery.

Photos: Agniv Dhar

Last night BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins took the stage and announced the BlackBerry Z10, the company’s first smartphone running BlackBerry 10. Now from a user-interface perspective, the Z10 is very fascinating and unique when compared to its competitors but from a hardware standpoint it is just matching whatever is available in the market and in some cases it’s not even achieving that. That said, it certainly has solid hardware and can give a decent fight to its rivals on the basis of its unique software. Read on to find out more.

From a spec-sheet standpoint, it has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, a 4.2-inch 1280×768 pixel display with 356 PPI, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a 8-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 1,800 mAh battery, microSD card slot and even NFC connectivity.

These specs are more or less in line with a top of the line smartphone from last year. Even if one looks at the Samsung Galaxy S III or the Nokia Lumia 920, both have 720p displays and both have Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 plus dual-core CPUs (For the Galaxy S III only in the US and it has a quad-core processor in India). Even in terms of photography, the Galaxy S III has an 8-megapixel camera, but the Lumia 920 wins this round thanks to its 8.7-megapixel PureView camera that comes with Zeiss optics and optical image stabilization for incredible low-light performance.

Even the iPhone 5 toes a similar line. Its new 4-inch panel maintains a resolution of 1136x 640 with 326 PPI and it comes with Apple’s latest dual-core A6 chip. Additionally, it comes in multiple memory variants and has an 8-megapixel camera that is considered to be among the best.

If one adds the newly launched HTC Butterfly to the equation, then the BlackBerry Z10 starts looking dated. The Butterfly has a 5-inch 1080p display, a quad-core Qualcomm S4 Pro processor, 16GB of memory, microSD card support, an 8-megapixel camera with HTC’s image sense chip, Beats Audio, and is also water resistant.

But hardware specs are only half the story and BlackBerry is in a unique position as it would leverage the new BlackBerry platform to stop its current users from migrating to other platforms. But with the absence of Google services and no integrated real-time turn-by-turn navigation, it would be difficult for the company to make Android or iOS users shift to BlackBerry. But this is just the first step for the company and being able to convince its faithful subscribers to continue would be great.

BlackBerry is showing off a lot of apps and services at its launch event in New York City that are deeply integrated into the BlackBerry 10 OS making life easy for the users and help them stay connected all the time. One such app BlackBerry showed off is the BlackBerry Remember.

BlackBerry Remember enables a user to be in charge of all his files, tasks and notes. You can flag messages, assign due dates, take voice notes, add attachments, and pull in contacts. It also integrates with an Evernote account to bringing all the notes together into the app. Bloggers too will benefit from this app as they can stay on top of interviews, stories and projects.

Here’s a video showing how BlackBerry Remember works:

Thorsten Heins has just announced that the company is being renamed from RIM to BlackBerry during the BlackBerry 10 launch event. “It’s one brand. It’s one promise!” exclaimed Heins before announcing the BlackBerry Z10 and the BlackBerry Q10 smartphones running on BB10.

The rebranding makes sense as everyone knows RIM as BlackBerry, anyway. Be it services or devices, everything is BlackBerry and it is only natural for the company to rebrand it as BlackBerry. In fact, not many people outside the industry actually know RIM but everyone knows BlackBerry. “Now RIM and BlackBerry are one brand,” Heins said at the launch event.

What do you think about it?

BlackBerry Z10 is again in the limelight with fresh photos leaked on the Internet courtesy of @evleaks. Though there isn’t anything drastically different from the previously leaked images, the photo on Twitter does show a close-up of a black and a white BlackBerry Z10.

The side profile of the phone shows a volume rocker on the right, a front-facing camera above the display, an earpiece above that and a lock button as well as a headphone jack on the top. According to the specs leaked earlier the Z10 is expected to have a 4.2-inch 1280×768 pixels display, 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage and a 1,800-mAh battery. It will also have two cameras, a front facing camera with a 2-megapixel resolution that will offer 2x digital zoom and 720p video recording and the camera at the back of the device will be sport an 8-megapixel sensor with a single LED flash, auto focus, 1080p video recording and 5x digital zoom.

Previously, we have seen @evleaks also tweet out images taken from the Z10 camera and whatever we have seen certainly impresses.

Due to the huge number of submissions for its 10K Developer Commitment and Built for BlackBerry programs, RIM has extended the deadline for application submissions to the Feb 18. RIM announced the extension of the deadline on their official developer’s blog.

The blog said, “We’ve heard your questions and concerns about the Built for BlackBerry deadline. The fact is the volume of apps being submitted for review and entry into the program has been remarkable. Due to that large volume of apps, we are extending the deadline.”

RIM’s Port-A-Thon programs saw over 19,000 applications being submitted by developers to the recently renamed BlackBerry World.

Read

As RIM closes in on the launch date for the BlackBerry 10 smartphone and OS, it has made a small change which could go a long way in making its app store more popular. RIM has removed the word ‘app’ from its store and it’s now known as BlackBerry World reports TechCrunch. What this change signifies is that apart from apps, the store will also provide multimedia content like music and videos.

RIM first talked about this apparent change to its store during the BlackBerry Jam Americas and today made it official through its blog. Clearly following in the footsteps of Google which changed its store’s name from Android market to Google Play Store, RIM plans to make the BlackBerry World a one-stop shop for all kinds of mobile entertainment.

This change RIM says will happen on the web storefront first and will be rolled out to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and BlackBerry smartphones in the coming weeks.

Read

In an interview with a German daily Die Welt, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins revealed that RIM might consider the sale of its hardware division post the group’s strategic review. The review could also lead to the sale of its software licenses among other options.

RIM though is now busy preparing for the launch of its new OS and BlackBerry 10 and will hope these help in winning back the market share lost to the likes of Apple and Android devices. “The main thing for now is to successfully introduce BlackBerry 10. Then we’ll see,” Heins was quoted as saying.

RIM is scheduled to launch the first set of BlackBerry 10 smartphones on January 30, in an event in New York. We have seen multiple leaks regarding the new hardware/software and it definitely looks interesting. That said, snatching market share away from Android and iOS will be hard, so we will need to wait and watch.

It looks like @evleaks is having a field day. After posting the HTC M7 render, the prolific leakster now posted an image shot which he alleges is from the BlackBerry Z10. The image seems to have been taken on a beach, but the image quality in itself seems to be very impressive. We also do notice a weird spot on the left side of the image, which could be a result of some editing, so judging the image purely on the basis of this image can be a bit tricky.

However, there are also signs of shallow depth-of-field, which is always a good thing because mobile cameras are not known for such quality. Of course, there are exceptions like the iPhone 5 and the Nokia Lumia 920, but in the world of RIM, cameras have always been an afterthought.

BlackBerry smartphones have been notorious for their poor imaging capabilities, but if this image is anything to go by then that’s about to change with the Z10. The Z10 is expected to have a 8-megapixel camera and it will also license technology from Nokia- owned Scalado for some impressive tricks.