BlackBerry 10 Prototype Is Given to Developers

RIM has effectively staked its future on its new BlackBerry 10 operating system. The need for the company to drastically overhaul its line of smartphones, which once dominated and defined that market, was underscored by an analysis released by IDC on Tuesday. It estimated that BlackBerry’s global market share fell to 6.7 percent during the first quarter of this year, roughly half of what it was in the same period in 2011.

“They’re not being stupid; they’re doing everything they can,” said Mike Abramsky, who recently left RBC Capital Markets, where he covered RIM as an analyst for a decade. “But this is about the challenges of being late to the game.”

At a company-sponsored conference for large customers and software developers in Orlando, Fla., where the prototype phones were given to about 2,000 developers, Thorsten Heins, RIM’s chief executive, made it clear that the company must shake its recent reputation for promising more than it could deliver. RIM has said the phones will be on the market by the end of the year.

“We’re hitting the milestones we set for ourselves on the new BlackBerry 10 platform,” Mr. Heins told the crowd. “I promise to you that the whole company is laser-focused on delivering on time and meeting your expectations.”

RIM emphasized that the prototype phones, which will allow developers to test the BlackBerry 10 applications they create, do not reflect the product that will ultimately be sold to consumers.

But for now, at least, they appear to represent an end to the BlackBerry’s signature physical keyboard, which many business users have stuck with even as touch-screen phones have surged in popularity.

After noting that “typing for BlackBerry users is really important,” Mr. Heins, along with another executive, demonstrated an onscreen software keyboard that they said would adapt to users’ typing styles over time. They said it would include novel ways of providing word prompts to speed up typing.

They made no reference to physical keyboards, and the prototype phones do not have even a single button on their front.

The executives also demonstrated how users would be able to swiftly move among several apps in the final version of BlackBerry 10.

Those features are absent from the prototype “alpha” phones and their software. Because the onscreen interface is still not finished, a simplified version of the one used for the BlackBerry PlayBook, the company’s tablet computer, is standing in for now. RIM said that it would make more elements of the BlackBerry 10 software available to developers by the summer.

Alec Saunders, the company’s vice president of developer relations, said it was necessary to get a “very, very stripped down” version to developers now to avoid a more serious problem later.

“The reason why we’re doing this — which is unprecedented for us, and it’s quite uncommon in the industry — is because we want to create a wave of application support behind the new BlackBerrys before we bring them to market,” Mr. Saunders said in an interview on Friday at a RIM office in Ottawa, where much of the new operating system was developed. “If we launch without applications, well, it will be slow.”

Apps have been important selling points for smartphones since Apple opened its App Store to support its iPhone. But current BlackBerry handsets have greatly lagged iPhones and phones using Google’s Android operating system in both the quantity and quality of apps available for them.

The prototype phones’ 4.2-inch, high-resolution display is much larger than the 3.5-inch display of the current iPhone 4S but smaller than the one on the largest Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note, which offers 5.3 inches. It is longer and wider than the iPhone to accommodate the larger display, but the matte black body of the prototype phone has about the same thickness.