BlackBerry 10: last roll of the dice?

 It’s the brand that defined a generation of executives and started much of the smartphone revolution. Even President Obama, photographed on Air Force One mid-email, made much of his ‘addiction’ to BlackBerry. Yet like the President himself, just a few years after it was riding high BlackBerry’s stock had plummeted. Yesterday in six major cities around the world, BlackBerry rolled the dice for one last time, and sought to persuade its already diminishing band of users that it was still at the cutting edge.

And indeed from FTSE 100 companies to police forces, millions of Britons still use BlackBerry. It remains the UK’s third most popular smartphone platform, shored up at first by young people being given their parents’ phones and latterly by cheap devices that were affordable for millions.

But a rash of bad publicity accelerated a nosedive, and not everyone thinks the company has done enough this week to pull out of it. From a murder at a BlackBerry-sponsored concert to the use of the company’s BBM messenger software by those involved in the London riots, it seemed that for a while BlackBerry’s luck was even worse than Nokia’s. Aware that it was falling behind, the company had bought a whole new operating system but was repeatedly forced to announce delays. Its co-founders left the front line of the business.

The pressure on the company formerly known as Research in Motion to reinvent itself, therefore, has been enormous. As part of the announcements yesterday, the company even confirmed that it would officially change its name to BlackBerry. And while America and the UAE remain huge markets, it is Britain that will see the first launch of BlackBerry’s new Z10 and Q10 handsets.

The Z10 is a touchscreen device, while the Q10 retains the famous keyboard that has built much of BlackBerry’s growth. At the heart of both of the devices is a new operating system, called BlackBerry 10, that combines a work persona with a personal mobile in a single device. The idea is that while a single interface allows you to see, say, your work and your home calendar, in fact the two separate things are completely segregated. If you select work, the photos you take with the BB10 camera are stored in a different place to those you take with it in personal mode. As one BlackBerry executive put it, “If you get fired, you don’t want the boss to delete all the photos you took of your kids”.