Getty ImagesResearch In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins shows off a new BlackBerry 10 smartphone at a launch event in New York City on Wednesday. The company has also changed its name to BlackBerry.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Research In Motion Ltd. unveiled two new smartphones for its BlackBerry 10 platform Wednesday and announced plans to change its corporate name to that of its flagship brand.
Research In Motion (US:RIMM) (CA:RIM) said its company name will now be BlackBerry. The new ticker symbol for the U.S.-listed shares will be “BBRY” on the Nasdaq and “BB” for its Toronto-listed shares. Those changes will take effect Monday. The BlackBerry 10 launch: Continuing blow-by-blow coverage.
The company’s shares were trading down more than 6.5% at $14.64 on Wednesday afternoon, after a launch event in New York City wrapped up. The stock has surged more than 140% over the past four months on anticipation for the new platform.
The launch is crucial for the company to revive its struggling smartphone business, which has come under brutal competition from the iPhone and Android platforms. Many BlackBerry watchers are skeptical that the company can get back its momentum.
“The BlackBerry 10 devices rise to the level of their competition, and in some cases — such as the keyboard’s prediction and multilingual support — surpass it,” wrote Charles Golvin of Forrester Research in a blog on Wednesday.
But, he added that “at best, RIM’s new products will allow it to stop the bleeding and hold its market share.”
Franscisco Jeronimo of IDC wrote that his first impressions of the new touch-screen BlackBerry “are quite good,” adding that the “new user interface has been radically improved and it now matches the experience on Android and iOS devices.”
He added that “for BlackBerry, there is no plan B available.”
At the event, RIM lifted the wraps on two new smartphones, called the Z10 and Q10. The Z10 is a full touch-screen device, while the Q10 includes a QWERTY keypad that has long been popular with some of the longtime users of the smartphone.
The Z10 is expected to launch “sometime in March” in the U.S. market, while the UK and Canada will see the device in early February. In the U.S., AT&T (US:T), Verizon (US:VZ), Sprint (US:S) and T-Mobile will carry the device.
Those carriers have confirmed plans to carry the Z10 device. Verizon said it will sell the device for $199 with a two-year contract.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Heins said the delay for the U.S. launch is mostly due to carrier testing of the new devices. “Make no mistake, everyone’s trying to pull the date in — carriers and us collectively,” he said in the interview.
No specific details were given on the pricing or launch timing of the Q10 with the QWERTY keypad.
The new platform and devices are key for the company’s survival in the competitive smartphone market, which has come to be dominated by Apple’s (US:AAPL) iPhone and the Galaxy brand of smartphones from Samsung (KR:005930) , which uses the Android operating system from Google Inc. (US:GOOG)
At the event, RIM demonstrated several new features of the BlackBerry 10 platform, including the ability to swipe between personal and business content that has been dubbed BlackBerry Balance. The company has also added video calling features to its BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, tool.
The new platform also features a unified content feature called BlackBerry Hub that brings together messages from emails, BBM and social channels.
The company also said it plans to bring the BB10 platform to its PlayBook tablet, but gave no further details.
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