BlackBerry's big pitch

It wasn't so long ago that executives wore a BlackBerry on their hip as a mark of their high-flying status.

As Apple's iPhone, and Google's rival Android-driven phones, started to mount their challenge, BlackBerry's appeal to young people rose at such a rate that youngsters were soon driving all the growth of the BlackBerry phones' maker, RIM.

This week, the company unveiled devices that it hopes will attract both executives and the youth.

It's a tall order. The new Z10 and Q10 handsets use an operating system that is new to everybody, but some analysts believe that such an approach could be BlackBerry's best hope of success.

Both devices are flagships, BlackBerry maintains, with one featuring a full-touchscreen and the Q10 - Q for qwerty - a typical BlackBerry keyboard. The aim is for the phones to recapture the peculiar "cool" BlackBerry once had and to help the company compete in a very different world.

So both of the new phones feature extensive film and music services and screens that are suitably high-definition. Both devices also have much-improved web browsers.

This is all in sharp contrast to existing BlackBerry devices, which many users believe are fatally flawed for web browsing because they are slow. Few customers use them for movies and music as iPhone and Android users do.

Crucial to the new possibilities is the BlackBerry 10 software, rebuilt from the ground up - the transition to which gave BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins what he has admitted was the most challenging year in his business life. As if to emphasise the scale of the change, RIM finally rebranded itself as BlackBerry, and jumped from operating system BB7 straight to BB10.

At the heart of the new OS is a system called "peek and flow", which puts users just a swipe of the thumb away from seeing all their social media messages, e-mails, appointments, tweets and updates in a single inbox called the BlackBerry Hub.

Perhaps most important in terms of BlackBerry's bid to maintain its unique appeal, the Hub can contain all your messages, both from personal and work accounts.

But the data and associated filing systems are kept completely separate, meaning your corporate IT manager is happy and your private e-mails are not visible to your employers.

Malik Saadi, an analyst with Informa, claims it's this that sets BlackBerry up for survival,

"This feature, plus the music and video hubs, and 70000 available applications, will enable the BlackBerry Z10 to make a good start in developed markets and potentially challenge devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III and Apple's iPhone."

"A good start" would mean BlackBerry selling a few million devices while its rivals sell hundreds of millions over the same period.

The company has a huge amount of ground to make up but some people believe that, by sticking to existing audiences, survival for BlackBerry is a real possibility.

It's no longer enough for BlackBerry to offer secure and controlled management of corporate information. So what the new operating system emphasises instead is that a single interface can provide equal, instant access to each different aspect of a modern user's digital life.

Telecoms provider PMGC sees a bright future for BlackBerry.

"Some of the new developments are genuinely innovative," says Jason Yeomans, of PMGC, who cites the new phones' Balance feature and the new interface.

"These are advancements that users will really love."

That remains to be seen; BlackBerry seems to have done enough, however, to satisfy its fans for now.

The industry is at least wondering what the next devices will deliver, instead of debating whether the company has a future.