With RIM's smartphone share sliding month after month in the US, any optimism the firm can turn things around has long rested on the handsets to come rather than those already on the shelves.

News the roll out of the first BlackBerry 10 devices has slipped to late 2012, therefore, is unlikely to ease concerns regarding the platform's long term future.

Black news

The revelation was made during the firm's most recent conference call, with co-CEO Mike Lazaridis blaming a critical chipset that won't be available in production quality until towards the end of 2012.

As such, the first phones running BlackBerry 10 OS – previously named BBX and comprising of QNX's platform currently winning plaudits on PlayBook – will be absent from shop shelves until around a year's time, further weakening BlackBerry's position as it looks to fight off Android and iOS's growing bases in major markets.

The platform, which was unveiled in conjunction with the firm's BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco in October, will support cloud services and environments for both HTML5 and native development.

The OS will also sport Scoreloop's social SDK following RIM's acquisition of the firm back in June, as well as BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps.

[source: Engadget]