Welcome again to another Location Technology news roundup. Well, here we are, BlackBerry 10 launch day and we see that RIM is gone and now rebranded and officially known this day forward as BlackBerry.

 The company hosted an online event in multiple cities and broadcast to the world live via a somewhat "cheezy" format as we listened in on the BB execs as they touted the new offerings in what seemed to be a relatively small room of hand-selected BB enthusiasts and groupies. The big news today though, the new BB Z10 and Q10 devices running on the all new BlackBeery 10 platform... will these devices save BlackBerry?? I'm not sure about you but yours truly here is not holding his breath... on the upside though, the Z10 does look somewhat impressive, in particular the strong build, slick BB messenger video and screen sharing capabilities - see more details in this blog post. FYI, In the UK, the BlackBerry Z10 will be available beginning tomorrow, in Canada, the BlackBerry Z10 will be available on February 5th, and in the U.S. market, availability with most carriers for the BlackBerry Z10 to be in March. Hey Developers... An interesting effort and competition from the USGS as they issue a call to developers in a search for hackers, mashup artists, devs, geogeeks and others to help in App-lifying and Enhancing USGS Earth Science Data. The USGS is seeking help via this platform from many of the Nation's premier appn developers and data visualization specialists in developing new visualizations and applications for datasets. The vehicle to achieve this is Challenge.gov a competition administered via the GSA - see more details here and Good Luck! Finally, for you Esri Geo developers, take not that Esri has opened up registration for the 2013 Esri DevSummit taking place later in March in beautiful Palm Springs - a great chance to get your GeoGeek on! Have a great week to everyone and please do follow us on @LBSzone and connect with us on Facebook  

Features:

Blackberry Unveils BlackBerry Z10 - UK Gets it First - Today is the day for Blackberry enthusiasts. the BB10 launch event (I'm still not holding my breath on this actually reviving the ailing smartphone maker!) The company has unveiled the latest platform and some new devices to tease you with. hey, they've even announced that Alicia Keys is the official "Creative Director" for Blackberry - whatever that means!

670 million smartphones ship in 2012, 67 million Samsungs in Q4 Alone! - Some interesting stats coming our of Juniper Research this week from the mobile industry. According to the latest figures more than 670 million smartphones shipped Globally in 2012 and in Q4 of the 200 million devices that sold, over one third of them were Samsung devices whereas about 47.8 million were iPhones, great news for Android users and in particular, Android app developers!

Nokia in 2012 - Cash Strong, Sales Down, Profits Up, no Dividends For Investors - Nokia has just publicly released their full financials for 2012 via their 2012 Q4 Interim Report. The PR was lengthy and full of charts and tables, however, I did manage to skim through and picked up on a few interesting numbers

Webcast - The BlackBerry Enterprise Vision and Roadmap