Buried amongst the announcements of the Motorola Razr, Android 4.0 and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus  at BlackBerry DevCon almost two years ago, the company formely known as RIM (having been renamed to BlackBerry) officially unwrapped its BlackBerry 10 operating system that it hopes will help them compete with iOS, Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone mobile platform.

Set to work on tablets like the BlackBerry PlayBook, and on the new QWERTY keyboard X10 and BlackBerry Z10 smarphone, here's a snapshot look at the features that BlackBerry hopes will save them from another year lagging behind Apple and company.

BlackBerry Hub

The place to unify texts, emails, BBMs and all of your social networking activity, this is the place to jump in and out all of your conversations from one place and then swipe away to go about your business playing Angry Birds Star Wars.

BlackBerry Flow

BlackBerry described this feature as a 'seamless way to move between applications' and is done simply by swiping from the bottom of the device so you can see all applications using fast and fluid reversible gestures. So multi-tasking basically.

BBM

We know that the instant messaging service has been a fixture for BB handsets for some time and now BlackBerry has improved the service adding voice calling and video chat support but perhaps more impressively is the introduction of a new screen sharing feature that let’s you view another BlackBerry 10 users display to view presentations and documents for instance.

BlackBerry Balance

Letting you switch between personal and work modes BlackBerry 10 users will be able to separate business and pleasure providing increased security with the inclusion of BlackBerry Safeguard technology and separate interfaces to distinguish between the two.

Time Shift

One for smartphone snappers, this nifty camera trick will help you sort out those pictures where you have managed to catch someone with their eyes closed by flicking back through the stages of the image to make it a snap that you will actually want to share.

BlackBerry Remember

Working essentially in the same way as an organizer, you can collate and collect information whether its notes, amazing ideas or memos and then create tasks or add dates to make sure they don’t go to waste. Interestingly, Evernote and Outlook support have both been integrated with BlackBerry Remember.

New BlackBerry keyboard

The always on keyboard ‘learns what words you use’ according to BlackBerry which means that you will be able to flick the words to the screen to speed up texting and typing. One of the nicer features which multi linguists will appreciate is the ability to choose up to three languages that the keyboard will support and will be able to work out whether you want to type in Spanish or French and then switch back when you are writing in English.

BlackBerry World

This could very well be the place that decides whether BB 10 sinks or swims, so the good news is that there is healthy 70,000 BlackBerry 10 apps already available to download with the likes of Disney, Rovio, Skype showing support from launch with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FourSquare apps already pre-installed and ready for action.