BlackBerry 10 arrives

It’s a change of name and a brand new smartphone… Research in Motion will now be called BlackBerry.

The company unveiled it’s new smartphone, the BB10, in simultaneous events around the world. BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins introduced the new BlackBerry 10 devices Wednesday morning in New York. The models were originally due for release last year.

Now, the new BlackBerry models are widely seen as a make-or-break product for the Canadian company.

The newly unveiled BlackBerry Z10 (pronounced “zed 10”) smartphone is a touchscreen model with a display slightly bigger than an iPhone and will be available in Canada beginning next Tuesday and in the U.S. in March. The BlackBerry Q10, which will have a physical keyboard, will follow at a later date.

Both devices will cost about $600 without a subsidy from a wireless carrier, and roughly $200 on a three-year contract.

One of the highlights is that the BlackBerry 10 will launch with 70,000 apps. To put that in perspective, Apple has over 700,000 apps available for it’s applications. But the one feature that Blackberry users will probably like the most is the BBM video calling. This feature lets users share screens with each other, and a story maker app that automatically stitches photos into a video clip and sets them to music. Another feature is the BlackBerry Flow, which lets users toggle between apps by swiping, rather than using the home button.