BlackBerry L-series smartphone, BlackBerry OS 10 features revealed in leak

Posted on 18 Dec 2012 at 10:07, by Gareth Halfacree

BlackBerry's long-awaited L-Series handset will be formally unveiled on the 30th of January, Research in Motion has revealed. Hot on that announcement's heels, leaks have provided a first glimpse of the new BB10 operating system.

Designed to fight back against the popularity of Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile platforms, to which Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices have been losing significant market share, BlackBerry 10 is a complete ground-up reinvention of the brand. Based on the same QNX operating system as the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, BlackBerry 10 devices feature the same focus on secure communications as previous BlackBerry releases but with far more support for third-party applications - including a compatibility layer that allows the user to install selected Android apps.

Early preview units of the BlackBerry 10 L-Series handset have already surfaced in Vietnam, and now they're joined by screenshots from the BlackBerry 10 operating system. As well as demonstrating the new user interface, which owes a considerable debt to the icon-heavy grid-based layout of Apple's iOS, the screenshots provide a glimpse of the BlackBerry Hub, an all-in-one messaging centre with integrated access to text messaging, email and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) services.

Another feature to be unveiled in the screenshots is a voice-activated assistant, extremely similar to Apple's iPhone 5 Siri application. Also on display are the third-party applications for social networking access from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare, along with the DocsToGo office document viewing utility.

Research In Motion has yet to comment on the leaks, but has formally announced that BlackBerry 10 will be unveiled at an event on the 30th of January - meaning BlackBerry fans won't have long to wait to see if the Vietnamese leaks are real.

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