Blackberry to launch its new Z10 in the UK first

Mobile phone users in Canada will have to wait until February, while it will go on sale in the US in March.

The Z10 is has a 4.2-inch touchscreen, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. It will come bundled with the Blackberry 10 OS, which the company has built from the ground up.

"Bringing an entirely new platform to the market and ushering this company through a really difficult transition took careful planning and we absolutely knew it was risky," said chief executive Thorsten Heins in a New York press conference.

It will face stiff competition from Samsung and Apple, which have both established themselves as the strongholds of the smartphone market.

At present, Blackberry devices account for around four per cent of all smartphone shipments, down from 19 per cent at the start of 2010, according to data from the IDC. 

Blackberry will also release the Q10 in the near future, a phone which harks back to the company's traditional phones with a physical keyboard and a smaller 3.1-inch screen.