Big news out of Water­loo, Cana­da today: Research in Motion has just announced via press release that it has set a launch date for Black­Ber­ry 10, the com­pa­ny’s next gen­er­a­tion mobile-oper­at­ing sys­tem, which Black­Ber­ry fans like us have been anx­ious­ly await­ing for many months.

Black­Ber­ry 10 marks a clean break from RIM’s old­er Black­Ber­ry OS, which first debuted at the end of the 1990s and ini­tial­ly pow­ered Black­Ber­ry pagers.

Though the exist­ing Black­Ber­ry OS was mod­ern­ized sig­nif­i­cant­ly in 2011 with the 7.x series (all Black­Ber­rys cur­rent­ly for sale run the 7.x series), RIM has known for some time that it need­ed to start fresh with a more pow­er­ful foundation.

That’s why, in 2010, the com­pa­ny bought QNX Soft­ware Sys­tems from Har­man Inter­na­tion­al. QNX is a pro­pri­etary, Unix-like oper­at­ing sys­tem that is wide­ly used in the indus­tri­al sec­tor. Users of QNX include Gen­er­al Elec­tric, Hon­da, the Unit­ed States Postal Ser­vice, Gen­er­al Motors, Cis­co, Land Rover, Chrysler, and Caterpillar.

QNX is espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the auto­mo­tive sec­tor, as is evi­dent from look­ing at the names of the com­pa­nies I just listed.

It is very pow­er­ful despite being very light, or compact.

RIM began adapt­ing QNX for use in mobile devices not long after it acquired QNX Soft­ware Sys­tems from Harman.

The fol­low­ing year (2011), RIM released the first device run­ning a QNX-derived oper­at­ing sys­tem: the Black­Ber­ry Play­Book tablet. The Play­Book’s Tablet OS has seen sev­er­al upgrades since the device’s debut, which have great­ly enhanced its fea­ture­set and addressed most of the short­com­ings flagged by reviewers.

Now RIM is bring­ing this new code­base to its smart­phone line. On Jan­u­ary 30th, the first smart­phones run­ning Black­Ber­ry 10 will be pub­licly unveiled to the world. It’s not clear when the new devices will go on sale; how­ev­er, it’s unlike­ly to be more than a cou­ple of weeks fol­low­ing the launch event. Devel­op­ers have had access to pro­to­type devices run­ning alpha and beta ver­sions of Black­Ber­ry 10 for sev­er­al months, but the gen­er­al pub­lic has not.

Two phones are expect­ed to be intro­duced on the 30th. One will be a “full touch” slate phone, sim­i­lar in form fac­tor to the iPhone 5 or the Sam­sung Galaxy S III, which are two of the top-sell­ing smart­phones in the North Amer­i­can mar­ket. The sec­ond will be a “QWERTY” phone with a phys­i­cal key­board for peo­ple like me, who can type a lot faster (and more accu­rate­ly) with phys­i­cal keys.

Spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the new phones are of course not out yet. But Black­Ber­ry enthu­si­asts have high hopes for the hard­ware as well as the new BB10 soft­ware. The new phones are expect­ed to have dual core proces­sors and at least 1 GB of mem­o­ry, per­haps more. The new devices are also expect­ed to sup­port 4G LTE wire­less bands, the lat­est revi­sions of the Blue­tooth and Wi-Fi stan­dards, and Near Field Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (NFC) in addi­tion to old­er 3G bands like HSPA and EV-DO.

His­tor­i­cal­ly, unlike Apple, RIM has designed its smart­phones so users can upgrade their capa­bil­i­ties. For instance, bat­ter­ies are remov­able and replace­able, and micro SD card slots are avail­able to expand the phones’ stor­age capacity.

Black­Ber­rys also make use of micro USB for charg­ing and trans­fer of data, obvi­at­ing the need to car­ry pro­pri­etary con­nec­tor cables. The new Black­Ber­ry smart­phones are expect­ed to have these advan­tages as well.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins has promised that impor­tant apps and fea­tures will be avail­able at launch. Black­Ber­ry Mes­sen­ger, or BBM, is said to be get­ting a sig­nif­i­cant upgrade, for exam­ple, while retain­ing com­pat­i­bil­i­ty for old­er devices.

But the heart and soul of the new Black­Ber­ry 10 OS is undoubt­ed­ly the “hub” and “flow” user inter­face that the com­pa­ny has been demon­strat­ing at its pop­u­lar “Jam” ses­sions, such as the one held in San Jose in Sep­tem­ber.

The hub is essen­tial­ly a con­ver­sa­tion man­ag­er. In some ways it resem­bles the email client intro­duced with Ver­sion 2.0 of the Black­Ber­ry Play­Book OS, with which it prob­a­bly shares some code. The hub lets a Black­Ber­ry user eas­i­ly view and sort all incom­ing mes­sages, whether they be emails, texts, emer­gency alerts, or BBMs.

The Hub also native­ly sup­ports the mes­sag­ing sys­tems of all of the major social net­works (Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn) and pro­vides a pre­view of upcom­ing meet­ings and events from the cal­en­dar. It can be accessed by sim­ply swip­ing up from the bot­tom, and then over to the right.

The Research in Motion team shows the hub, off one of the key fea­tures of Black­Ber­ry 10, which acts as a con­ver­sa­tion man­ag­er. Mes­sages in the glob­al view, seen to the right, can be fil­tered by type or by account, as seen on the left. (Cour­tesy of Research in Motion Ltd.)

Flow is the word RIM exec­u­tives have been using to describe how the new Black­Ber­ry 10 phones can be manipulated.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, smart­phones have been con­trolled by going to a home screen and call­ing up an appli­ca­tion. But in Black­Ber­ry 10 (as on the Play­Book), users can move between appli­ca­tions by swip­ing with a fin­ger. There’s no need for a home but­ton. It’s even pos­si­ble to “peek” at anoth­er appli­ca­tion with­out switch­ing over to that appli­ca­tion and giv­ing it con­trol of all the screen real estate.

It would be an exag­ger­a­tion to say that RIM has total­ly rein­vent­ed the smart­phone with Black­Ber­ry 10. But BB10 cer­tain­ly will break new ground with its user interface.

BB10 phones will also sup­port tech­nolo­gies oth­er smart­phones do not — notably Flash. RIM col­lab­o­rat­ed with Adobe to bring Flash to the Play­Book, and it is one of the tablet’s strongest sell­ing points. BB10 phones are sup­posed to sup­port Flash as well. While HTML5 has par­tial­ly dis­placed Flash, there are plen­ty of sites still out there that only offer video via Flash. With built-in Flash sup­port and 4G LTE, watch­ing a livestream or pre­re­cord­ed clip on a Black­Ber­ry smart­phone will be as easy as doing so on a desk­top or lap­top. Or Play­Book tablet.

Speak­ing of HTML5, BB10 offers full sup­port for the newest revi­sion of the Hyper­text Markup Lan­guage. RIM’s Tablet OS (for the Play­Book) cur­rent­ly bests all oth­er tablets when it comes to HTML5 sup­port, accord­ing to the Sights con­sul­tan­cy. Black­Ber­ry 10, mean­while, is tied with the open source Tizen OS in the larg­er mobile cat­e­go­ry for best HTML5 sup­port. (Devel­op­ment of Tizen is spon­sored by the Lin­ux Foun­da­tion; Tizen is descend­ed in part from Palm’s webOS).

It remains to be seen if the new BB10 phones can be com­pet­i­tive with the pletho­ra of Android devices avail­able, or the iPhone, in the Unit­ed States. RIM’s rep­u­ta­tion and mar­ket share in North Amer­i­ca have tak­en a beat­ing over the last two years despite remain­ing strong else­where. (Black­Ber­rys are extreme­ly pop­u­lar in coun­tries like Indone­sia, South Africa, Nige­ria, which are growth mar­kets). RIM’s big chal­lenge is mar­ket­ing. Once the new phones go on sale, RIM needs to be able to make sales in tan­dem with its car­ri­er part­ners. More than fifty car­ri­ers are cur­rent­ly test­ing BB10, and Ver­i­zon, the largest U.S. car­ri­er, has already indi­cat­ed it plans to be a launch car­ri­er. AT&T, Sprint, and T‑Mobile will prob­a­bly fol­low suit.

We look for­ward to the Jan­u­ary launch event and the future of Black­Ber­ry. As a non­prof­it that val­ues secu­ri­ty, pri­va­cy, and effien­cy very high­ly, we remain com­mit­ted to the Black­Ber­ry platform.

The self-appoint­ed tech­nol­o­gy experts at TechCrunch, AllTh­ingsD, and the New York Times may not be root­ing for RIM, but we are.