First glimpse of the Blackberry 10 Facebook app surfaces

After facing delay, time and again, Blackberry 10 makes an appearance, though unofficial, in the form of a leaked image showing the Facbook app. N4BB has revealed the leaked image of the Blackberry 10 device (codenamed Colt) showing the Facebook app with some enhancements that are not found in the current native Facebook app. The app shows option to select the quality before uploading the photo.

Leaked..(Image Credit:N4BB)

The image doesn’t give away a lot of details. As rumoured, the newest Blackberry device appears to be an all touch smartphone without any physical keyboard. Reportedly, BlackBerry 10 will be using TAT Cascades to offer rich looking native applications and UI. A part of it is the Share UI, which means how the UI will look when the user wants to share a picture, web page, or other objects to Facebook, BBM, Picasa, DropBox, and more. Then, there will be different level of controls that will come with the ability to hide lesser used controls, which will be added to the Cascade Core UI by winter 2012.

Earlier reports had suggested that the BlackBerry 10 operating system will not support a physical keyboard and will go all touch, instead. It won’t be for the first time that RIM will launch phones with touchscreens, it has done so in the past and failed. RIM has been pinning its hopes on the BlackBerry 10 system, which is said to offer multimedia, Internet browsing and apps experience that customers demand.

Only recently it was revealed that RIM pushed back the launch of BlackBerry 10 to early next year, even as it sees falling sales numbers. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, reports also suggested that Research in Motion would be slashing 5,000 jobs, i.e. 30 percent of its workforce, too.The picture of the future for the company continues to pale, as the delay would mean missing out on both the crucial back-to-school and Christmas shopping periods - a time when its competitors will continue to bring out more phones.

The report coming in at the time, quoted analyst Matthew Thornton of Avian Securities in Boston as saying, "It's like watching a puppy die. It's terrible," while Edward Snyder, managing director of Charter Equity Research in San Francisco stated, "Wow, what a disaster. From a numbers point of view, it could hardly be worse, and it's going to deteriorate from here." He was further quoted as saying RIM is now in "a handset death spiral."

The fact that the company is facing such a huge loss for the first time in eight years, coupled with "likelihood that sales keep sliding into 2013," according to the report "severely reduce the options for the company if it is to survive." It has been also reported that the company now expects the job cuts to cost $350 million in the current fiscal year, and it is also looking at cutting $1 billion from its operating costs in the year. "RIM now considers that $1 billion target as a minimum it will pursue, given the additional BlackBerry 10 delay. It said it had already cut layers of management, streamlined its supply chain and outsourced repair work," the report added further.