Just got back from an info session put on by RIM and have a few things to say.

First off, there is hope. Plain and simple, they did many things right. However, a lot of questions were met with 'no' when asked about common stuff from droid or iOS. Daren has it right though when he talks about somebody brand new to the market has three solid choices. Unfortunately, that market was huge 2-3 years ago, not so much now (at least in certain countries, world wide, it is still wide open).

Customization of the OS was the biggest downer. Things that it does are always 'on' no matter how much it may annoy you, you can't turn it off. But, this is software fixable.

The demo of the release device was very smooth. Perfectly on par with the big two.

The best innovation of the device though is the 'Hub'. For managing multiple email accounts and various social media and its integration into the OS was done extremely well.

Canada will be the first up for sales of the new devices after the global launch (global launch is just the formal announcement, spec details, etc... when they will go on sale). Expect to be able to buy devices in early Feb. The all touchscreen is the only device available at launch. The physical keyboard device is 'soon', maybe a month or two behind the initial launch.

All playbooks are updatable to BlackBerry 10.

If you are in IT, BES 10, especially in Q2, is looking like a monster of a program! If it goes smoothly, there is some pretty damn powerful stuff you can do.

I really wish they had more public consultation before releasing the device. Every time RIM said 'no' you could feel the room just sink. It was simple things that could be programmed very easily, but this close to launch, there is no way to implement it for launch. My unfortunate opinion is early adopters are going to be behind and suffer. With that being said though, the potential is definitely there, but as everybody has said about RIM as of late, they just took too long and aren't releasing a product that is way ahead of the competition. Many regards they are at par, but with this much time, they should have released something that was at least somewhat ahead of the curve.