Rumors were abound that in order to adapt and grow, RIM would be abandoning the mobile consumer space and would instead focus on what’s always been its strongest audience, the enterprise and professional market.

The rumors were sparked by Hein’s original comments in which he stated that RIM was refocusing on the enterprise market. The press and media took this statement out of context, and began speculation that RIM would no longer produce consumer related products.

“Many said that RIM will leave the consumer business- that is absolutely not true, that is not what I said.”

Heins clarified further that by his original statement, he only meant that RIM needed to stop designing as many services in-house and that they should instead try and achieve their consumer-based goals through external partnerships.

“We spend a lot of time on who are we mostly talking to, who is the target customer. The common denominator with all our customers is that they are striving to succeed.”

Heins went on to strengthen the idea of “success” which he first talked about yesterday morning during his presentation at the general session (keynote). RIM has refocused its goals to target productive Blackberry users who strive to be successful.

“When I talk about people that want to be successful that is not in any way exclusive. The design objective of Blackberry products is to help people succeed.”

Throughout the conference RIM continuously referred to it’s consumer base as “Blackberry people,” and identified them as all people who wish to succeed. It’s evident that RIM also plans to succeed. There is no reason why this new focus and “success” plan shouldn’t prevail, so long as RIM sticks to their guns.

RIM has made is abundantly clear that they want plenty of applications and content to be available for the Blackberry 10 launch later this year.

“We understand you want key content on your Blackberry when we deliver the new platform to you.”

Thorsten Heins, the CEO of RIM, identified that consumers want ample content available to them proceeding a product launch, and he clarified that RIM is dedicated to making that happen.

In order to attract developers to the dark side -okay, so that’s not politically correct- the Blackberry side, RIM gave every developer at the Blackberry 10 Jam one of the Dev Alpha devices for use during the development process.

By now you’re probably wondering how the red and blue caped crusader comes into play, keep reading, we’ll get to that.

RIM is doing more than just giving away a bunch of innovative phones to boost application development for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform. Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations, revealed that Blackberry will guarantee developers a minimum of $10,000 in annual revenue. If first year developers happen to fall short of the 10K mark, RIM will pay the difference.

But don’t for a second believe that RIM hasn’t added some stipulations in order to cover themselves. Before RIM pays for anything, the application in question must make at least $1,000 in the App store. If, and only if, the application makes its $1,000 sales mark, then RIM will play Superman and swoop in to save the day. This policy will at least form some kind of protective film for RIM, ensuring they only have to support quality apps.

Unfortunately, all you silly developers out there looking to make a quick buck with the next phone tanning app, we’re sad to report that you won’t be seeing a check from RIM anytime soon.

While we applaud RIM for adopting such an ambitious campaign, we can’t help but ponder how desperate it all seems. With this campaign RIM seems more than just desperate, they’re practically shouting to the heavens that Blackberry 10 apps will be sufficient, and we all know that a whole lot of shouting doesn’t just make things true.

If RIM maintained focus on building a great development platform, the apps would eventually come. Although, like RIM, Microsoft has also offered developers money for quality apps, so one could easily argue the counterpoint that desperation is absent and this is now a normal process.

We’re not knocking you RIM, we’re just wondering if this campaign is such a brilliant idea.

Nevertheless, the real news here is that RIM is entirely dedicated to fleshing out the application market for the Blackberry 10 product line. In fact, they’re so dedicated that they’re willing to guarantee developers $10,000 in profit.

Good luck with that RIM.

Blackberry users began squirming in their seats yesterday morning during the keynote when RIM confirmed that the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha device is, in fact, running the latest version of the Blackberry OS.

The demonstrations of the device and the Blackberry 10 features showed off a tremendously fluid user interface and virtual experience, but there was one blinding problem. The Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha device is purely a touchscreen candy-bar style phone, a physical keyboard was absent.

RIM has always offered Blackberry devices that included a hardware keyboard in the past. It’s understandable, and only natural, that worry would wrack a community which has grown accustomed to a physical keyboard on their mobile devices, especially when it comes to the public demonstration of a touchscreen mobile device that includes only virtual keyboard support.

Thorsten Heins, CEO of Research In Motion, confirmed this morning during a press exclusive Q&A session that RIM will be releasing Blackberry 10 devices with a physical keyboard. His confirmation puts to rest the rumors that Blackberry 10 will be a touchscreen exclusive. For those of you still holding your breath, you can now release.

“I can confirm that the physical keyboard will be an option in the Blackberry 10 portfolio.”

Heins went on further to say that while developing BB10 RIM focused on one question.

“What is the ideal typing experience on a Blackberry?”

The Blackberry experience was designed with this specific approach in mind. It’s no secret that typing is a core component of the Blackberry platform.

“We want the typing experience on the Blackberry to be the best in the world, whether that be on a physical keyboard or a virtual keypad.”

Several times during the keynote yesterday morning, Heins hinted at the idea that the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha device was only one of many products to come. But it wasn’t until this morning at the Q&A that he officially confirmed it.

“Make no mistake we only showed you one element of what the future of Blackberry will be, there are other elements to come.”

So, for those of you who have been erupting in fear, loathing and just pure nerd rage, you can relax your minds. The Blackberry 10 device lineup will include devices with a physical keyboard.

During the keynote, this morning, Research In Motion’s CEO, Thorsten Heins, gave an exclusive sneak peek at the new features of Blackberry 10. Oh boy, are we excited!

Judging by what we saw during the presentation it looks as if RIM has finally decided to use innovation in its newer Blackberry 10 OS. Of course, we are by no means saying that RIM wasn’t innovative in the past, but up until now, RIM has been set in its ways, which is rather evident by the company’s recent financial failures.

As Heins stated in the presentation, the new user interface of Blackberry 10 is “all about the flow.”

“We want a user paradigm that is easy and fast. The flow is taken to a new level in Blackberry 10. Everything flows continuously, it never stops, and because of that you just flow through it.”

“Applications run in realtime in the background. This means that apps run all the time, and never shut down, you can just flow through them.”

“With Blackberry 10, we are making you agile and nimble.”

RIM is remarkably confident that the new user interface and features of Blackberry 10 will lead to it’s success. We’re pretty confident too after seeing a demo, the Blackberry Dev Alpha device was responsive, fluid and innovative.

As is evident from the demos of BB10, the home screen UI is slightly similar to the panels seen on the Windows Phone OS. Users will have instant access to the most prominent features, including the infamous Blackberry universal inbox. All applications and tasks can be quickly swapped out utilizing the unique “Glance” feature.

The Blackberry 10 operating system will be available on all next generation Blackberry devices as well as the current gen Playbook (it will receive an OTA update). There’s been no confirmation whether or not older gen Blackberry devices will receive an update.

Unfortunately, both the hardware and software demoed during the keynote are not finished products which means design could change at any time.

For those of you who didn’t have the opportunity to catch the sneak peek that aired during the keynote, don’t you fret! We’ve got the Blackberry 10 sneak peak video below, as well as some images of the new OS in action.