According to new research from IDC, Microsoft’s mobile operating system accounted for 3.2 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter. That’s a significant gain from the OS’s performance in the first quarter of 2012, which saw it capture a market share of 2 percent. And it was enough for Windows Phone to unseat BlackBerry from its third-place spot and claim the rank for its own.

Admittedly, ousting BlackBerry wasn’t exactly a difficult task. In the first quarter, the struggling handset maker saw its share of global smartphone shipments halved year over year. In Q1 of 2012, it claimed a 6.4 percent share. This year, BlackBerry managed to snag only 2.9 percent.

An unfortunate loss of momentum for BlackBerry, though one that’s not entirely attributable to the ascension of other platforms and a lack of interest in its own. BlackBerry is in the midst of a transition to an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 10. Right now, the company has just two smartphones that use it. The bulk of its handset portfolio continues to run on its older OS. And according to IDC analyst Kevin Restivo, that’s almost certainly having an effect on sales.

“Windows Phone is clearly gaining momentum,” Restivo told AllThingsD. “But BlackBerry’s decline this quarter really has more to do with the lag between sales of its old handsets and its new ones than anything else. Sure, Windows Phone is ahead now, but there’s no guarantee that it will maintain its third-place ranking in upcoming quarters.”

And, as I’ve noted before, third place in the current smartphone OS rankings doesn’t mean much. According to IDC, Google and Apple captured 92.3 percent of all smartphone shipments with their Android/iOS duopoly (Android: 59.1 percent; iOS: 23 percent). In other words, Windows Phone and BlackBerry are so far behind the two leading mobile platforms that their ranking is really just a moot point, anyway.

Designed for emerging markets, the Q5 is intended to flesh out the lower end of BlackBerry’s new handset portfolio. Details are slim, but the device seems to be the rumored R10 that has been stoking chatter on gadget sites for months now. The Q5 features a Qwerty keyboard and a 3.1-inch touchscreen. BlackBerry is offering it in four colors: Red, white, black and pink. The company expects to bring the Q5 to market sometime this summer; price has yet to be disclosed.

Also announced this morning: BlackBerry 10.1 for the BlackBerry Z10 — which will begin rolling out to U.S. carriers later this month — and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10.1.

Today, BlackBerry is in a far less precarious position. It has finally managed to ship BlackBerry 10 — along with a couple of handsets on which to run it — and all have been generally well received. The company’s touchscreen smartphone, the Z10, set launch-day sales records in Canada and the U.K.; its Qwerty sibling, the Q10, has been garnering positive reviews; takeover rumors have gone quiet; the company reported a surprise profit in its most recent quarter, and its shares are up some 25 percent since the beginning of the year. While BlackBerry hasn’t yet escaped the skepticism that mercilessly dogged it last year, it has provided investors and developers — and really anyone with an interest in the company — some reason for cautious optimism, despite the still daunting challenges ahead of it.

There’s a lot riding on BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins’s keynote address at BlackBerry Live tomorrow morning, but the company is in a far better place to deliver. So what can we expect from Heins when he takes the stage tomorrow?

• An update on BlackBerry 10 handset sales volume and momentum. Heins has previously said he expects to ship “tens of millions” of BlackBerry Q10 handsets. Is that still the goal? What are the company’s expectations for the Z10?
• Perhaps, the unveiling of BlackBerry 10.1 for the Z10, which brings a number of new features to the device, including the ability to install Skype.
• An update on developer support for BlackBerry 10, the current tally of apps in BlackBerry World, and perhaps the announcement of some new and much-needed marquee apps.
  As I’ve previously reported, Netflix and Instagram have both declined to build native apps for BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry has said it is committed to bringing both of them and other top titles to its new platform. Heins’s keynote would be an excellent time to announce a few victories.
• Further insight into BlackBerry’s view of the tablet market. Heins recently made headlines for some bearish remarks about the future of tablets, saying, “In five years, I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.” If that’s the case, what is BlackBerry’s overall view of the future of mobile computing?
• An update of BlackBerry’s promised portfolio of BlackBerry 10 devices. What does the lineup look like beyond the Z10 and Q10? When will the rumored R10 ship? The company has already hit the market’s high end, presumably it plans to hit its middle and lower ends as well. What sort of device is it planning for emerging markets?

So, lots of issues to talk about, all of them speaking to a common theme. Now that Heins has seemingly succeeded in righting BlackBerry’s listing ship, where is it headed? And how is it going to get there?

According to sources close to the situation, well-known tech exec Jon Rubinstein will be joining the board of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker that has gotten a big boost of late for its role in the explosion of mobile devices.

Rubinstein is an interesting and logical choice for Qualcomm, having been a high-profile player for a long time in the mobile space, beginning with his work on the iPod while at Apple. After he left his last job at Hewlett-Packard last year, though, he has been very low-key.

(Update: Qualcomm confirmed the appointment in a press release.)

For Qualcomm, the selection of Rubinstein to join the board is something to watch, as he is the second exec from Silicon Valley to be tapped by the company recently. In March, Qualcomm hired tech investor Laurie Yoler as SVP of business development, making her “responsible for augmenting existing business relationships in Silicon Valley, as well as developing new strategic business opportunities for Qualcomm in the region.”

Rubinstein has even more experience here and is also familiar with a range of mobile efforts over the years, some of which were successful and others not so much, from his work at Apple, Palm and then HP. He is also a board member of Amazon.

Aside from CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, Rubinstein — who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science — will be the most technically experienced director on the 11-person board.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Here’s a nice primer on Rubinstein by Arik Hesseldahl, in a report on his leaving HP early last year:

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s BlackBerry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open-source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

Just you wait, BlackBerry is going to sell a ton of its new Qwerty-keyboard-equipped Q10 smartphone.

This according to Thorsten Heins, the struggling smartphone maker’s CEO, and early sales of the device seem to so far support that assertion. Speaking at the Milken Institute conference on Monday, Heins said the company has high hopes for the Q10. “We have very, very good first signs already after the launch in the U.K.,” Heins said. “This is going into the installed base of more than 70 million BlackBerry users, so we have quite some expectations. We expect several tens of million of units.”

Is that a reasonable expectation, or an unreasonable one?

Though it only began shipping in the U.K. a few days ago, the Q10 already seems to be in very high demand. Selfridges & Co., a British department store that had an early exclusive on the Q10, blew through its initial stock within two hours last Friday. And on Monday the store issued a press release declaring the handset its fastest-selling consumer electronics product ever. Said Selfridges exec Julian Slim, “The BlackBerry Q10 has been, without a doubt, the most highly anticipated smartphone we have ever sold and is already our most successful.”

Now, granted, we’re talking about one department store chain with four locations in a single country. Still, Selfridges & Co.’s experience suggests that are plenty of BlackBerry loyalists out there who have been waiting patiently for the company’s next Qwerty phone. And the Q10 has been garnering some great reviews that may push consumers looking for a serious smartphone with a physical keyboard to consider it.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized Selfridges & Co.’s smartphone selection as limited. That is not the case. Carphone Warehouse maintains a store-within-a-store at Selfridges & Co., offering a full selection of smartphones — though the department store’s website does not reflect that inventory.

“I’ve been evangelizing that BlackBerry is not a business device,” global gaming head Anders Jeppsson said. “It used to be, maybe, many years ago. But over 80 percent of our users are active consumers today, and they’re very, very social.”

In order to get to those users, though, developers must first be persuaded that porting games over to BlackBerry is simple and cheap. Naturally, Jeppsson said it is, thanks in part to the company’s open-source efforts on Github and the cross-platform social gaming tools provided by BlackBerry-owned Scoreloop.

Microsoft is also touting how easy it is for mobile developers to transition into its ecosystem, but — this is both a positive and a negative for Redmond — the discoverability gap versus BlackBerry 10 is huge. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are the newest members of a big family, including the proven powerhouse Xbox 360 and its accompanying Xbox Live Marketplace, not to mention Windows 8’s backward compatibility with innumerable PC games. Meanwhile, BlackBerry 10 is a nascent OS currently available on just one device, the Z10.

Efforts to bridge that device gap include some monetary incentives for BB10 developers, like the (now ended) “10K Commitment” that promised early-adopter devs up to $9,000 in free money if they couldn’t reach $10,000 in revenue in their first year on BB10. There’s also a first-mover advantage, Jeppsson added, because the OS is barely two months old. In other words, it’s easier for a game to break out on a non-Google and non-Apple platform because, at least for now, the pickings are slimmer.

Jeppsson said he’s been working on developer outreach since he came to Research In Motion in 2012, when RIM acquired Jeppsson’s user interface design company, The Astonishing Tribe. He claimed “many” developers are making more money with BB10 than they are on iOS.

But the devil’s in the details, and one of the biggest questions is, what proportion of BlackBerry 10 users are frequently playing games on their new Z10s? A company representative said she would try to find out last week, but did not respond to a follow-up request for numbers. (“Frequently” is important, because players who download games, open them once and never come back are near worthless for the free-to-play mobile developers that dominate the charts on other operating systems.)

Lack of specific numbers isn’t stopping Jeppsson from some good old-fashioned competition bashing when it comes to attracting developers from outside BlackBerry’s ecosystem.

“I think BlackBerry users are actually users that are willing to pay for quality content,” he said. “They expect a quality experience. They’re not going to sideload stuff and pirate it like Android [users], stealing software.”

However, he added that his newest goals are less about developer outreach and more about making the case that the consumer’s gaming experience is better on his side of the fence.

His hope is that, as phone hardware continually improves (“This is easily an Xbox One in terms of what it can do,” he said, holding up a Z10), users will be able to play the same games as consoles, so that a game started on the bus can be finished on the couch.

Again, Microsoft is preaching a similar message. But although it already has the console side of the equation worked out, its cross-platform games are more casual than the more complex hardware-constrained games Jeppsson aspires to pair with BlackBerry — or, indeed, run entirely on his phone.

“Why would you want to buy a big PC to play Counter-Strike, where you remove all the details anyway because you want 60 frames per second?” he said. “That’s how I play Counter-Strike.”

With the BlackBerry Z10 launched in a number of major markets and the QWERTY-keyboarded Q10 scheduled to follow it in April, BlackBerry will soon have its two marquee BB10 smartphones in wide release. What it won’t have, though, is a slick, new, affordably priced, entry-level handset for emerging markets.

That’s where BB7 comes in. BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins says the company plans to release a new handset running that legacy OS targeted at price-sensitive consumers in those markets. “We want to give them a good BlackBerry experience,” Heins told the Canadian Press. “So this is where probably another BlackBerry 7 product in that range makes a lot of sense.”

And indeed it does. BlackBerry has a lot of low-end loyalists in India, Indonesia and other emerging markets. It would be foolish to alienate them by forging ahead with only pricey new handsets running an unfamiliar OS. Better to offer them a BB7 smartphone that can serve as a transitional device until BB10 is more firmly established and keep them in the fold. In that scenario, the low-end BB7 phone serves as a placeholder for the low-end BB10 device that will someday replace it, and BlackBerry continues to hit that price-sensitive sweet spot where it has seen so much success in emerging markets.

“We’re not excluding those markets from BlackBerry 10 because of us wanting to sell BlackBerry 7,” said Heins. “You will see both in coexistence for awhile in those markets.”

Asked Thursday if he planned to divest his BlackBerry stake, which amounts to nearly six percent of the company’s outstanding shares, Lazaridis said he’s going to hold on to them for the time being. “I’m really proud of what we built together at RIM, and I believe I’m leaving it in good hands, and remain one of its largest shareholders,” he told Reuters.

Lazaridis’s decision to hold on to his BlackBerry shares is the bi-polar opposite of the one made by his colleague and former co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

Balsillie, who was also once one of BlackBerry’s largest individual shareholders, dumped his entire stake in the company a few months ago in a move that was viewed by some as a vote of no confidence in its comeback plan.

As encouraging as the smartphone maker’s surprise fourth-quarter profit might be, it’s clear the company faces some still-formidable challenges — particularly in shoring up its eroding subscriber base.

BlackBerry lost another three million subscribers in its latest quarter, with its customer base falling to 76 million subscribers. Until the third quarter, BlackBerry had posted subscriber increases fairly consistently. So the fact that it just posted a second consecutive decline — and one that was larger than expected — is cause for concern indeed.

Returning BlackBerry to its former glory is already a daunting task; pulling that off while subscriber numbers are declining only makes it more so. Obviously, BlackBerry subscribers are the most likely buyers of the company’s new BlackBerry 10 handsets, so an accelerating decline in their membership is troubling.

“The subscriber decline is actually slightly worse than it seems since it includes BlackBerry 10 subs that do not generate service revenue,” Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt told AllThingsD. “BlackBerry is losing subscribers at a more rapid rate in emerging markets, which up until a year ago was still a source of rapid growth. That’s concerning as well.”

Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum took a more pragmatic view of the decline, suggesting it was inevitable and, perhaps, not quite so worrisome.

“We’ve all known that sub number was going to start coming down,” Gelblum said. “The positive part that we only know now is that the subs they’re losing are mostly low-end prepaid subs who weren’t contributing much to the service revenue line and probably weren’t likely candidates to buy a Z10 in the first place.”

Appearing on CNBC on Thursday, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins downplayed recent declines in subscriber numbers, saying that services revenue per subscriber is the more important metric and the one that the company is striving to increase.

“The decline in the subscriber numbers is really associated [with] the former BlackBerry OS system, so we expect this to gradually continue with [a] single digit [drop], probably, in the next quarter,” Heins said. “What we’re really working on, and what we’re looking toward, is new services based on BlackBerry 10, and then we will be looking at the monetary value of those services, rather than pure subscriber numbers.”

In other words, this is all part of BlackBerry’s transition to its new platform.

A fair point, I suppose, though it would certainly be more reassuring if the number of departures weren’t quite so large. Down three million subs in a single quarter is sharp erosion and doesn’t bode well for a company that’s struggling to reverse its market-share loss. That’s a number that is very clearly going in the wrong direction, and BlackBerry really needs to execute in the next quarter to stanch the bleeding.

Posting Q4 financials before the bell on Thursday, BlackBerry reported earnings of 22 cents per share on revenue of $2.7 billion. The first number surpassed Wall Street estimates, the second did not. Analysts had expected BlackBerry to post a loss of 29 cents per share on revenue of $2.8 billion, according to consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters.

This is the second quarter in a row that BlackBerry has posted a profit after a string of dismal losses.

BlackBerry said it shipped six million smartphones during the quarter, including about one million BlackBerry 10 devices. So overall shipments were a bit lower than the 6.5 million analysts had been expecting, but the one million BB10 handsets were right on target. Less encouraging was the news that BlackBerry lost three million subscribers over the quarter. It began the quarter with 79 million and ended it with 76 million.

The company sold just 370,000 PlayBook tablets during the quarter. Clearly, amateur hour is not yet over.

BlackBerry ended the quarter with cash and equivalents of $2.9 billion. That was unchanged from the previous quarter. Good news, as the company plans to spend several hundreds of millions of dollars marketing its new BlackBerry 10 devices.

BlackBerry shares are up about 8 percent in pre-market trading.

As part of its earnings announcement, BlackBerry said that company co-founder Mike Lazaridis is retiring as director and vice chair of the board on May 1. “With the launch of BlackBerry 10, I believe I have fulfilled my commitment to the Board,” Lazaridis said. “Thorsten and his team did an excellent job in completing BlackBerry 10. We have a great deal of which to be proud. I believe I am leaving the company in good hands. I remain a huge fan of BlackBerry and, of course, wish the company and its people well.”

But, knowing that not all developers are ready to bet on a native app, the company has offered some shortcuts designed to get programs running on devices like its Z10, which went on sale this week at AT&T.

One of those is an emulation engine that allows Android apps to run. Roughly 20 percent of the 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps fall into this category, according to Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s vice president for global alliances and business development.

“We give them a very nice on-ramp to get onto the platform,” Mallick said in an interview Tuesday. “Our users deserve to have great content. If that is the fastest way we can get some of that content, that’s great.”

Some of those developers whose initial plans were to simply port their Android app are now committing to a native app based on the strong early sales of BlackBerry 10 devices in other countries.

Still other developers, Mallick said, are sticking with their Android apps but adapting them to take advantage of BlackBerry 10-specific features, such as the BlackBerry Hub.

Mallick noted that Amazon added BlackBerry-specific features when it brought over the Android version of its Kindle app, while eBay is adding support for push notifications to the Android app it brought to BlackBerry 10.

Longer term, of course, Mallick wants companies to build native BlackBerry 10 applications.

Some big-name developers haven’t announced BlackBerry 10 apps at all, including Netflix and Instagram.

“There are still some partners that are not in a position where their schedules line up with our schedules,” Mallick said. “There are some partners where their priorities are elsewhere, not even necessarily in mobile.”

BlackBerry is trying a number of tactics to seduce app makers. The company has a $10,000 guarantee aimed at showing developers they can make money on BlackBerry.

The company has also promised that its first crop of devices (there are six models due out in the next 12 months) will all use one of two screen sizes, in an effort to prevent fragmentation.

“Overall we’re excited by what we are seeing in the marketplace,” Mallick said. “We have a high level of confidence we will continue to see more of the application partners come on board.”

As for the U.S. launch, Mallick said he isn’t putting too much stock in reports that the Z10 is getting a lukewarm response at AT&T. Wait until the phone launches at T-Mobile and Verizon, he said.

“Take a look over the next couple of weeks,” he said. “I expect we will see a stronger response.”

Mike Lazaridis, the former co-chief executive and co-chairman of RIM, said Tuesday that he and Doug Fregin have launched the fund, Quantum Valley Investments. In an interview, Mr. Lazaridis said the fund is aimed at spurring commercial developments from breakthroughs in quantum science — the effort to understand and harness energy at its most infinitesimal level.

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A frame from the BlackBerry Z10 Superbowl ad.

We are still in the very early days of Research In Motion’s attempted rebirth, so it’s impossible to make even a reasonably accurate call on its prospects. But some early sales data suggests that the company, which is rebranding itself BlackBerry after its best-known smartphone, may be seeing strong demand for the Z10, the first of two BlackBerry 10 handsets it will roll out in the coming months.

According to channel checks conducted by Jefferies & Co., preorders in the United Arab Emirates and Canada have so far been “solid.” More encouraging, though, are early reports from the U.K., where Z10 sales are evidently off to a good start. Jefferies analyst Peter Misek reports lines outside a number of U.K. retailers selling the device, and says that sell-outs of the white Z10 have been widespread. The black Z10 is easier to come by, but Misek says that with that device, too, stocks are limited.

“We believe Carphone Warehouse is seeing widespread sell-outs, while O2, Vodafone, Orange and EE are seeing robust demand,” Misek explained. “We estimate sell-in to be at least several hundred thousand units.”

If that estimate is correct, this is encouraging news indeed for the company. While the U.K. is among the biggest BlackBerry markets in the world — if not the biggest — it’s far, far smaller than the U.S., a crucial market for BlackBerry.

If Z10 sees demand similar to that of the U.K. when it debuts in the U.S. in March, BlackBerry may have a chance to regain some of the traction it has spent the past five years losing. “To put [these early Z10 numbers] in perspective, the iPhone had first weekend sales of 5 million plus in the U.S.,” Misek said. “The U.S. is five times larger so continued strong sales could bode very well for Blackberry.”

Reach for comment on early U.K. demand for the Z10, BlackBerry spokeswoman Amy Jones said the company was encouraged by early demand.

“We have supplied initial shipments to our partners and carriers in Canada, the UK and the UAE (which is due to launch February 10th),” Jones said. “We are very pleased that our partners are able to start selling the BlackBerry Z10 so quickly following our global launch event. We are extremely encouraged that the initial demand for the BlackBerry Z10 has been high.”

On Thursday, shares of the smartphone pioneer continued the downward slide they began the day before, during the unveiling of its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 OS and handsets. BlackBerry shares opened down 10 percent and, at $13.21, they’re down nearly 4 percent as I write this.

Why the pessimism after what seemed to be a fairly successful launch event? The estimated arrival dates of the first of BlackBerry’s BB10 phones. Though the touchscreen Z10 debuted in the U.K. and will ship in Canada and the United Arab Emirates next week, it won’t hit the U.S. market until March. And the Q10, a BB10 handset with a physical keyboard, won’t be available anywhere until April. Later-than-expected ship dates imply smaller-than-hoped-for unit shipments, and the Street clearly finds that disappointing.

Beyond that, there are concerns about the BlackBerry ecosystem and addressable market that I mentioned earlier this morning. That said, BB10 is a vast improvement over its predecessor, and has certainly closed the gap with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. It’s not hard to imagine it appealing to BlackBerry diehards looking for a next-generation device. But the legacy user base is an easy mark. Those BlackBerry users who have defected to iOS and Android over the last few years will be a far harder sell.

However, when it comes to future tablets, Heins said the company is trying to figure out a way to combine software and services, since selling tablet hardware alone is a tough way to make money at the moment.

“We are looking for specific value-added services on top of the tablet,” Heins said.

His comments came in a question-and-answer session following the announcement of the first two BlackBerry 10 phones in New York.

He also addressed a few other questions, including the expected April arrival of the second BlackBerry 10 phone, the physical-keyboard-packing Q10.

As for battery life, the Z10 should get users through the day, Heins said, adding that the battery is removable for power users who want to carry a second.

Asked how he would measure success, Heins said that the company had specific sales targets, but he didn’t share those. Instead, he handed it off to marketing chief Frank Boulben, who said the goal is for early users to be very happy, and that, beyond that, the company hopes to quickly become the No. 3 player in smartphones.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
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And the news was not exactly promising, especially for those in the United States. First came word via The Wall Street Journal that it would be March before the first customers in the U.S. could buy a device.

Onstage, things actually got a bit worse, as Heins said “most” of the big four U.S. carriers would have it by March. Verizon announced that it would carry both the touchscreen Z10 and keyboard-equipped Q10 handhelds, but did not give availability.

The Z10 will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract. Pricing for the Q10 was not revealed at this time. Both devices will support the carrier’s 4G LTE network, and will come in black or white. The white Z10 will be an exclusive to Verizon Wireless.

AT&T is also set to offer both smartphones, but no word on pricing or release date. T-Mobile has a landing page up for the Z10, and it’s worth noting that it looks like the handset will support its upcoming 4G LTE network.

Sprint also said it would carry a device “later this year,” but it is carrying the keyboard-equipped Q10, which is expected to arrive later than the Z10.

Heins said the company’s main priority is getting the Z10 out the door. As for the keyboard-equipped Q10, “I think we will expect to see it in the April timeframe,” he said.

The device is going on sale in Canada and some other countries as soon as next week.

Speaking with reporters, Heins said Wednesday that a longer testing period at U.S. carriers is why it will take longer to hit the market here.

“The reason is that the testing process in the U.S. with those carrier partners is a rather lengthy one,” Heins said.

The BlackBerry Z10 features a 4.2-inch touchscreen displaying 356 pixels per inch. It has an eight-megapixel camera on back, and only comes in a 16 gigabyte model, though there is a memory-expansion slot. Meanwhile, the BlackBerry Q10 features a full physical keyboard with a 3.1-inch, 720 by 720-pixel touch display.

In his review of the BlackBerry Z10, AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg found the hardware decent and the user interface easy to use, but said that it will need to continue to add more apps if it’s going to succeed.

The BlackBerry 10 event is still taking place. Click here for our live coverage.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
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• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

In an interview ahead of a BlackBerry 10 launch event in New York, RIM Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said the first of two phones — a touch-screen-only device called the Z10 — will be available in the U.K. and Canada later this week.

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“We have reinvented the company, and we want to show that in our brand,” CEO Thorsten Heins said. “One brand. One promise. Our customers use BlackBerry, our employees work for BlackBerry, and our shareholders are owners of BlackBerry. From today on, we are BlackBerry everywhere in the world.”

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

Image: Ivelin Radkov / Shutterstock.com | Illustration: AllThingsD.com

The company confirmed on Friday that it plans a Super Bowl ad as part of the marketing push behind its new BlackBerry 10 operating system.

“A Super Bowl commercial is a great opportunity to show the re-designed, re-engineered and re-invented BlackBerry to tens of millions of consumers on the largest advertising stage of the year,” RIM marketing chief Frank Boulben said in a statement. RIM said the Super Bowl ad will kick off a week of launch activities across the globe to highlight the new operating system and the first two BlackBerry 10 devices.

RIM is due to show off BlackBerry 10 and the first phones running the software at a New York event on Jan. 30.

Earlier this week, Major League Baseball announced it is bringing its At Bat app to the BlackBerry, while the National Hockey League also plans streaming video support for the new RIM devices.

Image: Ivelin Radkov / Shutterstock.com | Illustration: AllThingsD.com

“BlackBerry has been an important platform for delivering content to baseball fans for many years, and we are excited to continue that relationship by developing At Bat for BlackBerry 10 in 2013,” MLB Advanced Media wireless exec Adam Ritter said in a statement.

The league isn’t quite ready to commit to just what features will be in the BlackBerry app, but said its developers are working to make the BB10 features “in line with what fans have come to expect from At Bat,” along with a user interface designed for BlackBerry 10.

Last week, the National Hockey League also said it was bringing support for its GameCenter Live streaming video app to the new BlackBerry operating system.

RIM has said that it isn’t going to try to be all things to all people, but it also wants the consumer apps that are key to its demographics. And, clearly, plenty of BlackBerry-toters are sports fans. As sports nuts ourselves (minus Kara), we at AllThingsD are still waiting to hear whether support for the NBA’s League Pass and NFL Mobile are also in the works.

The new BlackBerry devices will make their official debut at an event next week in New York.

BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, which is now available for download, allows for managing both old and new BlackBerry devices, as well as those running the Android or iOS operating systems.

“BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 empowers employees to be more productive and better equipped to serve customers while it provides business and IT leaders with the confidence that corporate data is protected and manageable in the same way they have long enjoyed with BlackBerry,” RIM Senior VP Peter Devenyi said in a statement.

RIM is offering a free 60-day trial of the server software, as well as a program for those with existing BlackBerry servers to upgrade to the new software. The company is set to detail the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones at a Jan. 30 event in New York, with all four major U.S. carriers planning to carry new BlackBerry devices.

RIM said that more than 1,600 businesses have signed up for a program aimed at preparing for the next generation of BlackBerrys, which run a new QNX-based operating system.

According to CEO Thorsten Heins, RIM is not married to the idea of OS exclusivity, nor is a deal to license BlackBerry 10 beyond the realm of possibility. In other words, nothing is off the table, and the company is keeping its options open. “The main thing for now is to successfully introduce BlackBerry 10,” Heins told Die Welt. “Then we’ll see.”

This isn’t anything new. It’s a variation on what Heins has been saying for months now with varying degrees of specificity. Last June, he even volunteered a theoretical scenario. “You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it — either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform,” Heins said.

Then, in an August interview with the Telegraph, Heins appeared to be sketching out just what a BB10 licensing model might look like. “We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year,” he said. “To deliver BB10, we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than [we] can do it.”

A few weeks later, Heins made an even more definitive statement. “QNX is already licensed across the automotive sector,” he said, referring to platform on which BB10 was developed. “We could do that with BB10 if we chose to. The platform can be licensed.”

Now, none of these remarks are confirmation that RIM will license BB10. But they’re a pretty clear indication that it would do so if the right financial and strategic incentives were there — and if there were a willing licensee, of course.

But to find a willing licensee, BlackBerry 10 must first prove itself in the market. And ensuring it does so successfully is RIM’s priority at the moment.

“Thorsten Heins has made it very clear that we are focused on the delivery of BlackBerry 10, which we will launch with events around the world on January 30th,” RIM spokeswoman Amy Jones told AllThingsD. “As he said on our most recent results conference call on December 20th, we continue to examine all available options to ‘create new opportunities, focusing on areas where we will be more effective partnering rather than going it alone, and ultimately maximizing value for all stakeholders.’ We do not have anything new to report on our Strategic Review at this time.”

Visa’s endorsement of RIM’s SEM system is a big win for the company, and one that could make it a player in the mobile payments space. RIM has a great reputation for security, which will no doubt lend some appeal to its NFC platform. With the BlackBerry maker managing the back end and Visa vetting the payments itself, SEM could do much to bolster confidence in NFC payments, particularly in places like the U.S. that have been slow to embrace the technology.

That said, RIM’s NFC solution isn’t the only one on the market. There’s Google Wallet, which the search giant has been rolling out with the help of Mastercard Paypass. And soon Isis, the NFC platform conceived by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile USA, should be more widely available as well, assuming the first two trial deployments in Austin and Salt Lake City go well.

So RIM will have a battle to fight in the mobile payments space, just as it does in the smartphone space. But SEM is another selling point for its new BlackBerry 10 platform, and with carriers adding more and more NFC devices to their portfolios this year, it could prove a good one.

With its offers of free BB10 training and the opportunity to easily upgrade existing BlackBerry Enterprise Server licenses, the program was designed to woo RIM’s bread-and-butter customers to its new platform. And it appears to be doing just that.

RIM says that more than 1,600 businesses in North America have registered for BlackBerry 10 Ready since it was announced in December — among them, government agencies, Fortune 500 companies and universities. And, according to Bryan Lee, senior director of enterprise accounts at RIM, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 is currently in beta testing with some 130 major government agencies and corporations.

“We are very enthused by the engagement and response of our customer base,” Lee told Reuters. “In terms of verticals and segments, we are seeing good activity levels across all of our segments from small- and mid-market to large enterprises.”

That’s encouraging news, and it bodes well for RIM, which is struggling to regain traction in the enterprise market it once dominated. The company is scheduled to debut its first BlackBerry 10 device at an event on Jan. 30.

“Well there you have it. 37.5 hours in, we hit 15,000 apps for this portathon,” Alec Saunders, RIM’s vice president of developer relations tweeted. “Feel like I’ve run a marathon. Thanks to all the devs!”

So, 15,000 app submissions in a single weekend. Impressive, though it’s unlikely that every app submitted will be approved for sale. That said, many will be, and that’s good for the BlackBerry 10 ecosystem, which RIM is obviously doing all it can to bolster prior to the operating system’s official launch in about two weeks. Meanwhile, investor sentiment toward RIM continues to improve. The company’s shares spiked as much as 11 percent this morning in anticipation of RIM’s forthcoming make-or-break OS release.