Resellers tasked with making customers’ printers and MFPs work with the growing legion of smartphones and tablets will soon have another device flavor to worry about. Research in Motion (RIM) gathered media and analysts for a six-city simultaneous launch of its corporate re-branding and launch of the new BlackBerry 10 operating system. Going forward, the company will be unified under the name “BlackBerry” – an effort to reinvigorate the brand – and has targeted BlackBerry 10 at hyper-connected users. The devices are set to launch in the U.S. in March and, as with past BlackBerry products, business users are the primary target audience.
The new BlackBerry operating system will launch on two new smartphones, the touchscreen-enabled Z10 and the Q10, which will utilize a physical keypad. BlackBerry 10 will also be supported by additional devices in time and will be carried by 110 carriers globally, including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile in the U.S. and Everything Everywhere, O2, Vodafone, BT and Carphone Warehouse in the U.K.
New features in BlackBerry 10 focus on increased efficiency, such as Blackberry Hub, a central place to manage conversations, emails, social media updates and notifications, and BlackBerry Flow, which enables users to swap quickly between apps. Another feature, BlackBerry Balance, secures work applications separately from personal content and could be valuable for businesses converting to a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model.
Several mobile print apps covered by BLI are compatible with BlackBerry devices, and we’ll update coverage as new versions are released. In the meantime, read our briefs and Solutions Reports for HP ePrint, Canon Direct Print and Scan for Mobile, Breezy, EFI PrintMe Mobile, KYOCERA Mobile Print, Lexmark Mobile Printing, Samsung Mobile Print and others in our Mobile Printing category.