[Richard Quest:] Tonight, we're all the Bs. BlackBerry: it's a new device and it has a new name to boot. Ben Bernanke: the US economy goes backwards. At this hour, the Fed's next move. And Boeing and the batteries: the company beat earnings, the Dreamliners are still on the ground. I'm Richard Quest, another
[B:] I mean business. Good evening. We are minutes away from hearing the outcome of the US Federal Reserve's first meeting of 2013.
[Quest:] Stocks are paring back early losses, and there was a surprise, worrying, some say. Quarterly contraction in US GDP in Q4. Jargon, perhaps. We'll explain what it means later in the program. We'll be looking for clues, not only about what happened in the last quarter of 12, but also QE3. That's the market, so just pulling back ever so slightly. Pretty much even Stevens, as you take it overall. BlackBerry 10 has arrived. It may be a year behind schedule. It still arrived to a heck of a fanfare.
[Unidentified Males And Females:] Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!
[Unidentified Male:] Here you go!
[Quest:] With the global launch in New York, the handsets were unveiled simultaneously in cities around the world. There are two of them. Now, there is the Z10, which is a full touchscreen device, and that's the first to go on sale. And then you have the that's the one on the left of your screen. Then you have the Q10, with the traditional push-button keyboard, the physical keyboard, which comes in a few months' time. With BlackBerry 10 in, Research in Motion is out.
[Thorsten Heins, Ceo, Blackberry:] From this point forward, RIM becomes BlackBerry.
[Heins:] It is one brand. It is one promise. Our customers use BlackBerry. Our employees work for BlackBerry. And our shareholders are owners of BlackBerry.
[Quest:] The popular musician Alicia Keys joined the party. She's been named as BlackBerry's new global creative director. You might remember Polaroid did a similar trick with Lady Gaga. Now, with all this hoopla and hype, shares in BlackBerry are sharply down. They're at $14.71, a loss of 6 percent on the day. The new ticker BBRY soon might be saying TTFN. BlackBerry's global market shares fallen around 20 percent in 09 to 5 percent last year, according to Gartley Gartner. Ali Velshi spoke to the chief executive, who you saw at the unveiling, that's the chief executive, Ali Velshi. Anyway, the chief executive's Thorsten Heins. Before the Research in Motion name was announced, Heins explains what he thinks will bring customers back to BlackBerry.
[Heins:] All these people are hyper-connected, right? They run several social networks, business networks. They want to be quick and fast. I think we will attract them by the flow that we provide. Just go across all your channels and all your applications.
[Ali Velshi, Cnn Chief Business Correspondent:] Are there enough of those users in the world, though? Who are you trying to steal from, iPhone users or Android users?
[Heins:] I'm not stealing, I'm winning.
[Velshi:] Who are you trying to win from?
[Heins:] We're not excluding anyone from what the future BlackBerry experience is going to be, so we want to win as many as we can.
[Velshi:] Let's talk about the delay. What was the delay in getting the BlackBerry 10, when you look back at it. I know it was a number of things, but when you look back at it, was it worth it?
[Heins:] We had to do this, because it is a defining milestone in the history of RIM. We had to make sure that we had the quality that everybody expects from a BlackBerry. And there were some quality risks when I looked into the program that we detected, and we needed to make sure that we deliver the quality that people expect from us. Right call, and frankly, we got out of the noise and the holiday season. Would I have loved it to launch it earlier? Sure. But I think now we have a lot of attention, as you can see, and it was the right call.
[Velshi:] Now you've got the basis to build a future. You really have gotten to live another day. What does the future look like?
[Heins:] So, two horizons. What we will do on BlackBerry 10 is we will continue to build a portfolio of product. As for those markets that you referenced to, like Asia-Pac, Africa. We want BlackBerry 10 to also succeed in those markets. So, low debt portfolio in this year. Second, what we did is we built this platform not just with SmartPhones in mind. We think about this on your head is your personal mobile computing power. Now, think about what that does for you in enterprises, in heath care, in automotive. So, we want to go with BB 10 into those verticals. That doesn't mean it's the BB 10 hardware.
[Velshi:] Right.
[Heins:] But it's the BB 10 platform in the cards, the BB 10 platform in a health care element, right? And that's what we're going to explore as the second horizon of RIM. And then we have the devices, we have the services, we have the mobile computing end point management with BES 10. Here you go.
[Quest:] And here you go. That is the BlackBerry Zed 10 Z10. Jim Boulden has given it a go, and he's with us now. Jim?
[Jim Boulden, Cnn International Correspondent:] You know, I like it. I have to say. It is a brand-new BlackBerry. You think of it as like a different, brand-new phone from a different carrier, if you will. Different handset maker. It's got a lot of bells and whistles in this. And the things that I like a lot is Balance, if you know what Balance is. It's the difference you've got the corporate side and you've got the personal side, and I think things like that is what might might might get companies to think again about going back to BlackBerrys if they choose to. And earlier today, I did get a demonstration with the COO, Kristian Tear. Let's have a look at some of the bells and whistles on this.
[Kristian Tear, Coo, Blackberry:] This is the first full-touch BlackBerry that we do, but it also provides a fantastic keyboard. A lot of our users have been sharing BlackBerrys because they have fantastic keyboards. This one also has an absolutely stellar keyboard and the best keyboard experience that you can expect.
[Boulden:] But you've got virtual keyboard, but there will be also one that still has the physical keyboard, right?
[Tear:] There is one coming later on with a physical keyboard as well.
[Boulden:] And when will we see this in stores in Europe?
[Tear:] We will start selling basically in the UK tomorrow, or tomorrow in the UK, and we'll keep on rolling out in different countries throughout the month of February.
[Boulden:] Reliability has become an issue with BlackBerry, and there have been some very well-known failures. Even if it's been a couple days and even if it was a year and a half ago, people haven't forgotten that.
[Tear:] The BlackBerry service is very, very reliable, and we're continuously working on making it even more reliable. And BlackBerry 10 is absolutely supporting that as well, and making it the most secure experience you can have.
[Boulden:] With my current BlackBerry, obviously, if I'm in something, I kind of have to get out of it to go into something else. You've changed all this with this software.
[Tear:] We've changed that. It is a completely new experience, like I said. With one gesture, we'll always get back to the most important site for you, which is the hub. That's where everything comes together, and you don't have to close an application, you don't have to open up another one and then close it and then go deeper down into it. So, with one gesture, you will come back to the hub again, and you can do multitasking and you keep several applications running at the same time.
[Boulden:] So, how can you convince companies in Europe that have migrated away from BlackBerry to come back to BlackBerry?
[Tear:] The Balance feature is definitely one of those. So basically, it provides a good consumer experience, it provides a great enterprise experience. Balance is a feature where basically it allows a consumer and an enterprise to fulfill the needs for both. So, if you're as a consumer, you want to browse the internet, you want to do your things, your IT manager, he would definitely not want you to do certain things. This phone allows you with the feature of Balance to actually have to personas. So, you have one side, which is completely secure behind the firewalls, controlled by the CIO and providing a very, very and the most secure experience.
[Quest:] So, that's what you think or that's what they think. What was your impression?
[Boulden:] Well, I'm sorry that it doesn't have the physical keyboard yet, because that's what so many people want. And of course, I'm addicted to using my thumbs, as they say, so that doesn't come out probably until April. Also, there's some apps missing. There's 70,000 apps at launch. They think 100,000 apps in a few months, but there's no Netflix, no Instagram, a few of the ones that people probably would like to have. And it doesn't connect to the Cloud the way it does in iPhones, so I think that's one of the things that they're going to have to work on as well.
[Quest:] These are the two. I'm showing these are the two of the competitors.
[Boulden:] That's the iPhone, course
[Quest:] Yes.
[Boulden:] the smaller. So, the new one, the new BlackBerry Z10 is bigger. A bit more, to me, like a Samsung. Look, we're talking about third place, here, aren't we? We know, like we said last night, the single-digit market share at the time, can they get corporate customers to come back? Can they get people to be interested in it? They talked a lot more about what the phone can do and they didn't talk a lot about e-mailing, which of course is why a lot of people have them.
[Quest:] Right.
[Boulden:] They wanted to talk more about the whole experience with this new phone.
[Quest:] By the way, while we're talking, I am just tweeting @RichardQuest, why oh why didn't they launch the model with the physical keyboard? Which strikes me as being the extraordinary thing. Why didn't they do that?
[Boulden:] Well, they didn't tell us why, but it is already a year delayed, but it's clear that I would say that they said to us the reason that we're launching tomorrow in London first and then a few countries over the next few weeks, not to the US until for a couple more weeks. They want to make sure they have supplies, they want to make sure they get ready. But people like me are going to probably wait for the physical keyboard.
[Quest:] Yes, you see, I'm a great lover of the physical keyboard, having been a devotee of the original typewriter.
[Boulden:] Right. "Quick brown fox," right?
[Quest:] Sorry?
[Boulden:] "Quick brown fox jumps over the moon?"
[Quest:] "The quick " Yes. "The quick -" Yes. By the way, anybody who doesn't who wants to know why anybody who's maybe under 40 or maybe even to 30 wants to know why the keyboard is QWERTYUIOP, that is the reason why, because under the old keyboard, you risked all the keys getting stuck in the middle. Did you know that, Jim?
[Boulden:] I didn't. But I've used typewriters. I learned how to use a typewriter.
[Quest:] You didn't.
[Boulden:] But there we are. "The quick brown fox jumps over the moon." Five seconds.
[Quest:] No, it wasn't. It was "The quick brown fox jumps over the -" "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
[Boulden:] Well different
[Quest:] Finally on
[Boulden:] different cultures.
[Quest:] One more question on BlackBerry.
[Boulden:] Yes?
[Quest:] In a word, are they betting the ranch on the 10?
[Boulden:] Absolutely. This is it. This has got to work for them.
[Quest:] This has got to work.
[Boulden:] Unlike that.
[Quest:] Don't you mock my "The quick -" When we come back the Fed statement's about to come out. Investors have already had a bit of a shock. Get the smelling salts ready.