THE HANDSET MAKER previously known as RIM on Wednesday launched its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones: the Q10 with the familiar QWERTY keyboard, and something new for the company -- the touchscreen-based Z10.

BlackBerry, as the firm is now called, will release the Z10 in the United States in March with the Q10 following in April.The company released full specifications of the Z10, but only had a placeholder Web page for the Q10 because "we’ll be showcasing the Z10 and what it can do, and we’ll release more information when we can,” BlackBerry spokesperson Nick Manning told TechNewsWorld.The BlackBerry Z10 will have a touchscreen with gesture-based navigation, a virtual keyboard with contextual auto-correction, next-word prediction and a personalized learning engine that gets to know the way users type.Its 4.2-inch screen has a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels, and a 15:9 aspect ratio.

The Z10 has a dual-core 1.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of flash memory. It also has a removable microSD memory card with up to 64 GB capacity; a USB 2.0 high-speed port for charging and data synchronization; and a micro HDMI port for connection to a projector or an HD TV set.