It's been leaked and previewed and speculated about for months now. The only thing left to do with the BlackBerry 10 operating system is release it, and RIM—now officially renamed to "BlackBerry"—finally did that today at its press event in New York City.

"Ladies and gentlemen... This is BlackBerry 10," the liveblog host intoned dramatically before handing the floor to BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins.

The new operating system, which will be available on the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 handsets, attempts to satisfy the needs of BlackBerry's existing (if shrinking) business user base while also making a play for those who have jumped ship for the greener pastures of iOS or Android. The Z10 is an all-touch handset, while the Q10 trades some screen real estate for the physical keyboard that many BlackBerry users demand. For the US market, the Z10 will be available on most major carriers (AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) in March. Pricing will vary by carrier but is expected be around $149 for a three-year contract.

In Canada, the Z10 will be available February 5. The UAE will get the Z10 on February 10. UK users, hang onto your hats: the Z10 will be available in the UK tomorrow, January 31.

The Q10's availability was a little more nebulous, with BlackBerry saying that it will appear in "April" for the US.

To win over consumers, BlackBerry 10 bets big on touch: our own hands-on with a preview version of the operating system showed off an OS that ditches buttons almost entirely in favor of sometimes complicated gestures. The operating system's main features should be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of modern smartphones: grids of application icons and home screen widgets (which are actually miniature versions of currently running apps) are present and accounted for, and the BlackBerry Hub feature is roughly analogous to iOS or Android's notification center. The gestures allow users to swipe quickly and fluidly between applications which continue operating in the background. Checking e-mail when the iconic red e-mail light flashes can be done with a single swipe, which can then be done in reverse to return to the previously running application. In a change from the typical set of smartphone and tablet gestures, BlackBerry 10's are designed to be done with one hand.

Recognizing that most BlackBerry users are "on the go" types, the BlackBerry Hub pulls in information from many different sources, allowing quick gesture-based access to your calendar and contacts. Further, management tasks—deleting or flagging e-mails, for instance—are all quickly done through thumb-based gestures.

Though BlackBerry recognizes that physical keyboard lovers don't want to give up their fretted keys, the software keyboard on the Z10 features a large amount of predictive logic, letting users "flick" entire words onto the screen with their thumbs. The keyboard also allows backspacing through a swipe gesture, instead of having to hammer on a backspace key repeatedly.

BlackBerry 10's biggest innovation, the feature that aims to serve your needs both at home and at work, is its dual-persona mode, called "BlackBerry Balance." BlackBerry 10 users can have one set of apps and settings enabled when at work and another completely separate set of apps and settings for when they're at home. This allows administrators to manage apps and settings without actually interfering with their users' phones in their off-hours, and it gives those users an easy way to shut out those pesky work e-mails and notifications while they're trying to relax. A large number of Ars readers have expressed an interest in a dual-persona phone, and at least on paper RIM's implementation looks solid. The home and work apps can be blended together and addressed through a single view, too. Balance requires the device to be registered with BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

BlackBerry Messenger, which supports real-time chat between BlackBerry users, makes its return in BlackBerry 10. In addition to the standard text-based chatting, the new version features FaceTime-style video chatting. It also features a screen-sharing mode, which operates similarly to screen sharing on desktop collaboration tools—one user's screen contents are duplicated on the other user's screen. This is useful for troubleshooting problems or quickly sharing a picture without having to e-mail it or send it via BBM. BlackBerry didn't officially state whether the screen sharing and video calling abilities require Wi-Fi or are available over cellular.

The new operating system has a pretty typical set of picture-taking tools; the camera app sports standard features such as tap-to-focus. However, the single-hand thumb gestures extend into the camera's post production application, letting you quickly apply visual effects and do basic photo editing on the smartphone. You can then pull your photos or videos into the BlackBerry Story Maker app and produce a short video or slideshow, adding transition effects and even music from the smartphone's music library.

A software platform is only as good as its apps and content, and RIM is trying to be aggressive on this front: its "Port-a-Thon" contests have offered developers some financial incentive to bring their applications over, and RIM has heavily leveraged these and its existing relationships with mobile app developers to pack BlackBerry 10's app store with over 70,000 applications in time for the launch, including heavy-hitters like Skype, Amazon's Kindle, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and of course Angry Birds. The 70,000 apps include "more than one thousand" high-demand applications from big partners. BlackBerry points out that this is more apps than any other smartphone platform launched with. Additionally, BlackBerry has partnered with every major movie studio and record label in order to get video and music content into the BlackBerry World store.

We won't know for sure about the general quality of these apps (or if they were built specifically for the platform rather than being hastily done ports from other operating systems), but it's encouraging to know that the app store won't be a ghost town for early adopters.

BlackBerry will remain an active player in the tablet market, officially confirming rumors that the Playbook tablet will also be receiving an update to BlackBerry 10 at a future date.

We'll have hands-on impressions of the finished operating system and handsets later today. BlackBerry is handing out Z10 review units to all the press attendees, so we'll have our own full review of the hardware and software soon.