In less than eigh­teen hours, exec­u­tives at Cana­di­an telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions pio­neer Research in Motion will simul­ta­ne­ous­ly take the stage at a set of media events in major cities around the world to offi­cial­ly unveil Black­Ber­ry 10, the com­pa­ny’s much antic­i­pat­ed next-gen­er­a­tion mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem, which RIM hopes will put its line of smart­phones back in the van­guard of mobile computing.

Tomor­row’s prod­uct launch, which will be anchored by RIM CEO Thorsten Heins in New York, is the biggest in the his­to­ry of the company.

The tech press have been invit­ed to attend spe­cial events where Black­Ber­ry 10 will be show­cased in more than a half-dozen cities around the globe: New York and Toron­to in North Amer­i­ca, Lon­don and Paris in Europe, Jakar­ta in Ocea­nia, Johan­nes­burg in Africa, and Dubai and New Del­hi in Asia.

Black­Ber­ry users and enthu­si­asts all over the globe (includ­ing us) have been anx­ious­ly await­ing tomor­row’s prod­uct launch, for it rep­re­sents the future of the plat­form that we rely on to get things done.

At these events, RIM is expect­ed to offi­cial­ly unveil its first two Black­Ber­ry 10 hand­sets, which will report­ed­ly be called the Z10 and the X10.

The Z10 will be a touch­screen-only phone with an advanced vir­tu­al key­board that more close­ly mim­ics the phys­i­cal key­boards that Black­Ber­ry is known for, while the X10 will sport a QWERTY key­board sim­i­lar to the one found on the Black­Ber­ry Bold ⁹⁹⁰⁰⁄₉₉₃₀ series for those­who pre­fer a phone with an actu­al keyboard.

RIM has promised that both hand­sets will run Black­Ber­ry 10 equal­ly well.

The com­pa­ny has spent months devel­op­ing and per­fect­ing Black­Ber­ry 10. Mul­ti­ple delays have sore­ly test­ed the patience of loy­al cus­tomers, who have con­tin­ued to stand by RIM as oth­ers have aban­doned Black­Ber­ry for Android and iOS. But the wait­ing for #Team­Black­Ber­ry is about to come to an end. At tomor­row’s launch, RIM is expect­ed to unveil pric­ing and avail­abil­i­ty infor­ma­tion for the Z10 and the X10, which RIM says an unprece­dent­ed num­ber of wire­less car­ri­ers are com­mit­ted to launch­ing. There have even been rumors that some car­ri­ers may be ship­ping hand­sets as ear­ly as this week to those who have preordered.

While RIM has not yet intro­duced Black­Ber­ry 10 to the gen­er­al pub­lic — that’s what tomor­row’s launch event and the 2013 Super Bowl ad the com­pa­ny has pur­chased are for — it has already earned high praise from devel­op­ers and enthu­si­asts who have been giv­en pro­to­type devices to play with.

It’s said to be fast, flu­id, and very stable.

Because the Black­Ber­ry 10 plat­form does not actu­al­ly share any code with the cur­rent Black­Ber­ry OS (which is based on Java), it lacks the flaws and quirks of Black­Ber­ry smart­phones now on the mar­ket. Instead of Java, Black­Ber­ry 10 is built on QNX Neu­tri­no, the same under­ly­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem that pow­ers RIM’s Black­Ber­ry Play­Book tablet, intro­duced in 2011. QNX can already be found inside of vehi­cles, nuclear pow­er plants, and data cen­ters in addi­tion to the Play­Book. Now, it will be at the heart of RIM’s Black­Ber­ry smart­phones, too.

The first release of QNX actu­al­ly came out two years before Mike Lazaridis found­ed Research in Motion. How­ev­er, like RIM, QNX’s her­itage is Cana­di­an; it was cre­at­ed by Uni­ver­si­ty of Water­loo stu­dents Dan Dodge and Gor­don Bell. Dodge con­tin­ues to over­see devel­op­ment of QNX; he is now the lead soft­ware archi­tect for Research in Motion, and has been tasked by RIM CEO Thorsten Heins with exe­cut­ing on the com­pa­ny’s vision for Black­Ber­ry 10.

Unlike near­ly all of the major oper­at­ing sys­tems in use today, QNX has a micro­ker­nel instead of a mono­lith­ic ker­nel. In lay­man’s terms, this means the oper­at­ing sys­tem has a dif­fer­ent archi­tec­ture. It’s very com­pact and portable; the ker­nel sim­ply does­n’t have that many lines of code. It is mod­u­lar to its core, unlike Lin­ux (used in Android), XNU (the ker­nel inside of Mac OS X and iOS) or the NT ker­nel (found in Win­dows), which are mono­lith­ic or most­ly monolithic.

So what does this mean for users? In a few words, sta­bil­i­ty and true mul­ti-task­ing. As Play­Book own­ers can attest, when a mis­be­hav­ing appli­ca­tion crash­es, it does­n’t brick the tablet. The appli­ca­tion hav­ing a prob­lem may need to be restart­ed, but the device does­n’t have to be, nor do oth­er open applications.

RIM’s deci­sion to buy QNX Soft­ware Sys­tems from Har­man Inter­na­tion­al in 2010 may end up being viewed years from now as the move that saved the com­pa­ny from a dis­as­trous fate. In QNX, RIM has a robust, indus­tri­al-grade oper­at­ing sys­tem with a proven track record and a promis­ing future… an OS capa­ble of mak­ing its Black­Ber­ry smart­phones ultra­mod­ern and cut­ting-edge once again.

RIM exec­u­tives say that Black­Ber­ry 10 is like noth­ing on the mar­ket today. In demon­stra­tions, or demos, the com­pa­ny has pro­vid­ed glimpses of the new user inter­face, which is based on con­cepts they call Hub, Peek, and Flow. The Hub is an always-on, always-acces­si­ble all-in-one mes­sag­ing cen­ter that han­dles emails, tweets, sta­tus updates, BBMs, LinkedIn invi­ta­tions, and text mes­sages. Users can eas­i­ly get to the Hub at any time, no mat­ter what appli­ca­tion they’re in with the swipe of a fin­ger. Mes­sages can be sort­ed by account or by ser­vice with just a few taps of the fin­ger; the Hub is said to be very customizable.

The Research in Motion team shows the hub, off one of the key fea­tures of Black­Ber­ry 10, which acts as a con­ver­sa­tion man­ag­er. (Cour­tesy of Research in Motion Ltd.)

Flow is described as the abil­i­ty to move between appli­ca­tions with­out need­ing to click on a home but­ton or go to a home screen. A Black­Ber­ry user can choose to run mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions at once and quick­ly move between as desired. Users can also peek at adja­cent appli­ca­tions with­out leav­ing the appli­ca­tion that they are in.

RIM obvi­ous­ly has­n’t offi­cial­ly released spec­i­fi­ca­tions for its new hand­sets yet; it will do that tomor­row. But the new phones are expect­ed to be 4G capa­ble, with fast proces­sors, plen­ty of mem­o­ry, larg­er screen sizes, and high­er qual­i­ty dis­plays than pre­vi­ous Black­Ber­rys. The hand­sets will launch with a much larg­er appli­ca­tion selec­tion than either iOS or Android had dur­ing their debuts; RIM says that over 70,000 appli­ca­tions will be avail­able to users through the Black­Ber­ry World store­front at launch. (The store­front will serve up music, movies, and tele­vi­sion shows in addi­tion to appli­ca­tions, RIM says).

In recent days, a num­ber of major com­pa­nies, devel­op­ers, and con­tent providers have announced their sup­port for the Black­Ber­ry 10 plat­form, including:

• ESPN (a unit of Walt Disney)
• ooVoo
• The PGA Tour
• Major League Baseball
• Rovio (the stu­dio behind Angry Birds)
• 10Tons (the stu­dio behind King Oddball)
• Cis­co
• TuneIn Radio
• Buffer

The list (which is much longer than what you see above) does not yet include Insta­gram, Net­flix, or Skype, but that does­n’t mean it won’t even­tu­al­ly. RIM has a good rela­tion­ship with both Face­book (the own­er of Insta­gram) and Microsoft (the own­er of Skype), so it’s very pos­si­ble those ser­vices will work with Black­Ber­ry 10. Net­flix has pub­licly shown less inter­est in the Black­Ber­ry plat­form, but RIM may well be work­ing behind the scenes with them. We’ll have to wait and see.

Reuters checked with each of the Unit­ed States’ Big Four car­ri­ers (Verzion, AT&T, Sprint, T‑Mobile) and all of them have con­firmed they will be sell­ing Black­Ber­ry 10 hand­sets in the near future. Every major Cana­di­an car­ri­er is on board as well.

The Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy (NIST) has already award­ed Research in Motion FIPS 140–2 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, which means that Black­Ber­ry 10 is already primed for devel­op­ment by gov­ern­ment agen­cies and in cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments. That’s a good thing, because RIM needs to be able to start ship­ping the new phones out to cus­tomers as soon as possible.

Black­Ber­ry 10 hand­sets will also come with a fea­ture RIM calls Black­Ber­ry Bal­ance. Bal­ance allows for mul­ti­ple pro­files to be stored on a hand­set — a per­son­al pro­file and a work pro­file. Cor­po­rate IT depart­ments can wield full con­trol over the work pro­file on a Black­Ber­ry 10 hand­set, while the entire­ly sep­a­rate per­son­al pro­file remains under the con­trol of the indi­vid­ual user.

Bal­ance is RIM’s response to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend. With Bal­ance, users who want a ful­ly-func­tion­al Black­Ber­ry won’t need to car­ry a sec­ond phone. Instead, they’ll be able to make use of mul­ti­ple pro­files on just one device.

Black­Ber­ry Mes­sen­ger has also been revamped for Black­Ber­ry 10. RIM has­n’t said much about the improve­ments to BBM, but Black­Ber­ry enthu­si­asts are hop­ing that video call­ing will be sup­port­ed. (BBM got voice chat sup­port last month).

We should know more tomorrow.

If you are inter­est­ed in par­tic­i­pat­ing in the launch event, you can watch the whole thing live from the com­fort of home — RIM will be offer­ing a livestream begin­ning at 7 AM Pacif­ic Time. We’ll be watch­ing and cheer­ing for RIM.