Glut of R-rated movies putting Box Office on overload

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Bullet to the Head,” the guns-blazing, axe-swinging action film from Sylvester Stallone, arrives Friday and is the latest violent, R-rated movie to open in January. The month itself could be rated “R” – for Repetitious.

Nine of the 11 movies released widely since the start of the year and Friday are rated “R.” Of last weekend’s top 10 films, eight carried the restricted rating, which requires youngsters under 17 to be accompanied by an adult.

Hollywood distribution executives regularly maintain that variety in the marketplace –including films with a range of ratings – is essential to doing strong overall business. January, traditionally a slow box-office month, is running roughly 10 percent ahead of last year. But last week was the first week to be down from 2012, and it’s possible the preponderance of R-rated offerings is taking a toll.

“There’s been one PG-13 release this month – ‘Mama’ – and it went right to No. 1,” Exhibitor Relations senior analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap, “and I expect ‘Warm Bodies’ will do the same this weekend.”

“Warm Bodies,” which comes out Friday from Lionsgate, is a PG-13 teenage zombie romance based on a young adult novel. “There has to be a degree of pent-up demand from kids out there,” Bock said.

It’s violence more than sex that’s driving the R-rated trend. Two of the nine releases –”Texas Chainsaw” and “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” – were 3D gore fests. Three – “Parker,” “Broken City” and “Gangster Squad” – were crime dramas. Two – “The Last Stand” and Warner Bros.‘ “Bullet to the Head” – are action films, and two were comedies: “The Haunted House” and “Movie 43.”

Several R-rated films have scored at the box office this month. Best Picture Oscar nominees “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Django” and “Silver Linings Playbook” over performed. “Texas Chainsaw” and “Hansel and Gretel” both went to the head of the class with openings in the $ 20 million range.

But too many movies of the same sort can leave some demographic groups underserved, as well as limit a film’s playability. For example, there’s a good chance MGM and Paramount’s action fantasy “Hansel and Gretel” might have done better had teenagers been able to get in without bringing an adult.

“With some films,” explained distribution chief Don Harris of Paramount of “Hansel and Gretel,” “you really don’t have a choice. From the time it was conceived, this one was going to be an R-rated movie and there was no amount of editing or tweaking that was going to change that.”

Harris noted that of the top four comedies released last year, three – Universal‘s “Ted” and “This Is 40,” and Warner Bros.‘ “The Campaign” – were rated R.

“That is clearly a developing genre,” Harris said, “with a high ceiling.” Exhibit A might be “Ted,” which has taken in $ 515 million worldwide, with nearly $ 300 million coming from overseas.

The other top comedy, “Parental Guidance” from Fox, has very much benefited from its PG rating. “We were the only true family movie in the market place for weeks, and it paid off,” Fox distribution chief Chris Aronson said. “Parental Guidance” has taken in about $ 70 million since opening on Christmas Day.

The trend won’t end any time soon. After this Super Bowl weekend, both of the following week’s wide releases – the Universal comedy “Identity Thief” and the Open Road Films crime drama “Side Effects” – are rated R.

It won’t be until Valentine’s Day that things will change. On that Thursday, the PG-13 Warner Bros. drama “Beautiful Creatures,” the PG-13 Relativity romance “Safe Haven” and the Weinstein Company’s PG animated film “Escape From Planet Earth” will all hit theaters. The latter will be the first kids film to hit the marketplace since Disney re-released “Monsters Inc.” in December.

But those who like their film mayhem full-on needn’t despair. Fox’s Bruce Willis action film “A Good Day to Die Hard” opens that day, too. And it’s rated R.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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During Trial, New Details Emerge on DuPuy Hip

When Johnson & Johnson announced the appointment in 2011 of an executive to head the troubled orthopedics division whose badly flawed artificial hip had been recalled, the company billed the move as a fresh start.

But that same executive, it turns out, had supervised the implant’s introduction in the United States and had been told by a top company consultant three years before the device was recalled that it was faulty.

In addition, the executive also held a senior marketing position at a time when Johnson & Johnson decided not to tell officials outside the United States that American regulators had refused to allow sale of a version of the artificial hip in this country.

The details about the involvement of the executive, Andrew Ekdahl, with the all-metal hip implant emerged Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court during the trial of a patient lawsuit against the DePuy Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson. More than 10,000 lawsuits have been filed against DePuy in connection with the device — the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R. — and the Los Angeles case is the first to go to trial.

The information about the depth of Mr. Ekdahl’s involvement with the implant may raise questions about DePuy’s ability to put the A.S.R. episode behind it.

Asked in an e-mail why the company had promoted Mr. Ekdahl, a DePuy spokeswoman, Lorie Gawreluk, said the company “seeks the most accomplished and competent people for the job.”

On Wednesday, portions of Mr. Ekdahl’s videotaped testimony were shown to jurors in the Los Angeles case. Other top DePuy marketing executives who played roles in the A.S.R. development are expected to testify in coming days. Mr. Ekdahl, when pressed in the taped questioning on whether DePuy had recalled the A.S.R. because it was unsafe, repeatedly responded that the company had recalled it “because it did not meet the clinical standards we wanted in the marketplace.”

Before the device’s recall in mid-2010, Mr. Ekdahl and those executives all publicly asserted that the device was performing extremely well. But internal documents that have become public as a result of litigation conflict with such statements.

In late 2008, for example, a surgeon who served as one of DePuy’s top consultants told Mr. Ekdahl and two other DePuy marketing officials that he was concerned about the cup component of the A.S.R. and believed it should be “redesigned.” At the time, DePuy was aggressively promoting the device in the United States as a breakthrough and it was being implanted into thousands of patients.

“My thoughts would be that DePuy should at least de-emphasize the A.S.R. cup while the clinical results are studied,” that consultant, Dr. William Griffin, wrote.

A spokesman for Dr. Griffin said he was not available for comment.

The A.S.R., whose cup and ball components were both made of metal, was first sold by DePuy in 2003 outside the United States for use in an alternative hip replacement procedure called resurfacing. Two years later, DePuy started selling another version of the A.S.R. for use here in standard hip replacement that used the same cup component as the resurfacing device. Only the standard A.S.R. was sold in the United States; both versions were sold outside the country.

Before the device recall in mid-2010, about 93,000 patients worldwide received an A.S.R., about a third of them in this country. Internal DePuy projections estimate that it will fail in 40 percent of those patients within five years; a rate eight times higher than for many other hip devices.

Mr. Ekdahl testified via tape Wednesday that he had been placed in charge of the 2005 introduction of the standard version of the A.S.R. in this country. Within three years, he and other DePuy executives were receiving reports that the device was failing prematurely at higher than expected rates, apparently because of problems related to the cup’s design, documents disclosed during the trial indicate.

Along with other DePuy executives, he also participated in a meeting that resulted in a proposal to redesign the A.S.R. cup. But that plan was dropped, apparently because sales of the implant had not justified the expense, DePuy documents indicate.

In the face of growing complaints from surgeons about the A.S.R., DePuy officials maintained that the problems were related to how surgeons were implanting the cup, not from any design flaw. But in early 2009, a DePuy executive wrote to Mr. Ekdahl and other marketing officials that the early failures of the A.S.R. resurfacing device and the A.S.R. traditional implant, known as the XL, were most likely design-related.

“The issue seen with A.S.R. and XL today, over five years post-launch, are most likely linked to the inherent design of the product and that is something we should recognize,” that executive, Raphael Pascaud wrote in March 2009.

Last year, The New York Times reported that DePuy executives decided in 2009 to phase out the A.S.R. and sell existing inventories weeks after the Food and Drug Administration asked the company for more safety data about the implant.

The F.D.A. also told the company at that time that it was rejecting its efforts to sell the resurfacing version of the device in the United States because of concerns about “high concentration of metal ions” in the blood of patients who received it.

DePuy never disclosed the F.D.A. ruling to regulators in other countries where it was still marketing the resurfacing version of the implant.

During a part of that period, Mr. Ekdahl was overseeing sales in Europe and other regions for DePuy. When The Times article appeared last year, he issued a statement, saying that any implication that the F.D.A. had determined there were safety issues with the A.S.R. was “simply untrue.” “This was purely a business decision,” Mr. Ekdahl stated at that time.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article described the start of the DePuy trial incorrectly. It began last week, not Wednesday. The error was repeated in an earlier summary.

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Slot maker WMS Ind. to be sold for $1.5B

Gaming machines maker WMS Industries Inc. is being swallowed up by larger rival Scientific Games Corp. for $1.42 billion in cash and debt.

The deal announced Thursday values WMS at $26 a share -- nearly 60 percent higher than the stock's closing price on Wednesday. Shares shot up in early trading Thursday after the deal was announced, rising 54 percent to reach $25.14, just under its 12-month high.

Scientific Games primarily makes instant lottery tickets and software. Executives said on a conference call that grabbing WMS will allow it to quickly expand its offerings in arcade-type games, slots and video poker.

While Scientific Games executives on a conference call rejected the characterization that WMS is in the midst of a "turnaround," business has certainly been improving in recent months for the Waukegan-based game maker.

WMS, formerly Williams, said in November is fiscal 2013 first-quarter profit tripled on a combination of higher revenue and lower costs. 

The revenue was driven by new initiatives, including social gaming on Facebook and mobile phones, that's paid off.

Those new ventures have compounded the growth WMS has seen as it gambled on some other new outposts for its business.

In September, it received one of the first licenses to operate online poker games in Nevada, the only state other than Delaware to legalize some form of Internet gambling.                       

Online sites in Nevada are expected to go live in early 2013, but only people physically within that state's borders will be able to play. For everyone else, there's WMS's Facebook app, "Jackpot Party Social Casino."

The companies plan to save about $90 million through operating efficiencies by the third year they're combined. They expect the deal to close by the end of the year, pending regulatory and other approvals.

Executives say they are still working out the details on how the combined company will be run, so there's no word yet on whether the company's headquarters will remain in Illinois or if there will be any layoffs. A spokeswoman for WMS didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

sbomkamp@tribune.com | Twitter: @SamWillTravel

WMS data by YCharts

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Ryan sent home after spending just hours at halfway house

Former Gov. George Ryan spent just hours at a halfway house on Chicago’s West Side this morning before he was released and sent to his Kankakee home, where he will be on home confinement until he completes his 6 ½-year sentence.

Ryan will not have to wear an electronic monitor while under house arrest, according to his lawyer, former Gov. Jim Thompson.

"I think it was a wise decision by the Bureau of Prisons, but it's not something I asked for, it's not something he asked for. So it is in no way preferential treatment,” Thompson said.

Ryan left the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. at about 1 a.m., arrived at Thompson's home around 4:30 a.m. in sweats and changed clothes, Thompson said. He was processed at the halfway house and arrived in Kankakee at about 10:30 a.m.

Thompson said he suspected the Bureau of Prisons allowed Ryan to bypass the halfway house because of his age. He will be 79 next month.  "A halfway house wouldn't be helpful to him,” Thompson said. “They teach people how to write checks, how to construct a resume, how to look for a job."

Thompson said there was no point in Ryan taking the place of another inmate in a halfway house if others would benefit more from the services.

"When you leave the penitentiary, you are sent to either a halfway house or to home confinement," Thompson said. "Home confinement's a regular program of the Bureau of Prisons, just like a halfway house, because they can't fit everybody in a halfway house. So apparently the Bureau of Prisons decided home confinement was a better outcome."

Thompson said Ryan will have to follow the rules of the halfway house even though he is at home.

Speaking to a crowd of reporters outside Ryan’s Kankakee home late this morning, Thompson said Ryan was inside with more than a dozen relatives. He said the former governor would not be coming outside to address the media.

"He's doing fine inside. He's with 17 kids and grandkids," said Thompson as many of Ryan’s relatives, mostly children, gathered on the front stoop smiling and occasionally hugging one another.

Thompson said he has not spoken with Ryan about how it feels to come home after the death of his wife, Lura Lynn.  "I imagine it's very hard. Just as I imagine it's been very hard ever since she died and it's been very hard ever since he left her. At least he's got closure now with his family."

Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke also insisted that Ryan did not receive special treatment. He said BOP officials would have made the decision based on several factors – including whether Ryan had a stable environment to go back to in Kankakee.

“There is no requirement to actually spend a minimum amount of time in the halfway house,” Burke said. “How much time is based on the needs of the offender. Whether or not he has financial support, family support, an approved release residence. His health issues.”

Burke said Ryan knew he would bypass the halfway house home confinement long before he left the federal prison.

“To surprise the inmate with something at the last minute would not be conducive to transitioning back to society,” he said. “It wouldn’t do any good to keep secrets from inmates.”

As for Ryan’s release from the prison in the middle of the night, Burke said that call would have been made by BOP officials who have to consider “special characteristics that an inmate may present.”

When asked if a former governor with intense media scrutiny would be on such characteristic, Burke replied, “That would be one thing.”

A somber and silent Ryan had arrived at the halfway house shortly before 7 a.m. Wearing a gray sports coat, white shirt and maroon tie, Ryan was surrounded by TV cameras as he walked down the street and entered the four-story red brick building.

Ryan smiled tightly as he refused to answer questions from reporters. Ryan's son, George Ryan Jr. and Thompson accompanied Ryan into the house.

After Ryan checked in, Thompson came back out and told reporters "today is another step in a long journey for George Ryan. . .He would like me to tell you he's grateful to leave the penitentiary. He's grateful also for the encouragement and support from many people. He has paid a severe price. The loss of his wife and brother while he was in the penitentiary, the loss of his pension, his office, his good name and 5 1/2 years of imprisonment. Now near 80 years old, that is a significant punishment. But he is going to go forward."

Ryan left the prison early this morning and managed to escape the notice of media camped at the facility. The first indication that Ryan has been released was around 6:45 a.m. when he left a building down the street and started walking toward the halfway house.

His son put his left hand on his father and guided him out the door. Ryan kept his head down, his hands in his pockets as he talked to his son and walked slowly through the knot of TV cameras.

As they neared the halfway house, a worker opened the door and tried to clear a path through the cameras. Ryan raised his head, his hands still in his pockets, his son to his right, as he walked down five steps and into the halfway house.

Thompson said Ryan didn't speak much during the van trip to Chicago.

"He didn't talk much, just small talk," Thompson said. "He looks good. He's been lifting weights. . .He knows something about carpentry now.

"He tied his own tie this morning, he hasn't forgotten that," Thompson said. "He's in decent spirits. He has to become accustomed to seeing things differently. . .We came down Michigan Avenue and he was looking at the lights left over from Christmas. That was sort of wonderful, I think. He hasn’t seen the city of Chicago in 5 1/2 years.”

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The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem

BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]

BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]

This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.

Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.

And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Musical comedy “The Sapphires” sparkles at Aussie Oscars

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Home-grown romantic musical comedy “The Sapphires” shone at Australia‘s film industry awards on Wednesday, picking up best film and lead acting trophies for Deborah Mailman and “Bridesmaids” star Chris O’Dowd.

Awards host Russell Crowe, an Oscar winner for “Gladiator,” led a star-studded evening whose theme was pride in Australia’s outsized success on the international film stage.

“The Australian academy may be small but over the years we have won more than 60 BAFTAs and Oscars,” said Crowe at the second annual Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards, affectionately known as the “Aussie Oscars.”

Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Jeffrey Rush were all on hand for the event at Sydney’s Star casino, leading guest presenter Jeremy Renner to joke: “You can’t throw a bottle out the window in Hollywood without hitting an Australian.”

The Sapphires, a possibility for next year’s Oscars, tells the story of four women from a remote Aboriginal mission who are catapulted on to the world stage as Australia’s answer to the Supremes when a kind-hearted manager, played by O’Dowd, hears their powerful voices and sends them to entertain troops in Vietnam.

“Films find their way because of a certain strength,” Kidman told Reuters. “The Sapphires is such a unique story and it’s great music and great talent.”

Director Wayne Blair’s debut film also won for direction, cinematography, editing, best production design, costume design and sound.

Best Young Actor went to Saskia Rosendahl for her role in the Australian-German film “Lore”, about a teenage girl who leads her younger siblings across Germany at the end of World War Two. Rosendahl was just 17 when the film was made.

The awards weren’t without controversy after the director of “Bait”, the 3D shark-in-a-supermarket horror-comedy that was Australia’s highest grossing film internationally last year, accused the academy of snubbing his movie.

While The Sapphires was Australia’s top-grossing film domestically, with more than A$ 14 million ($ 14.63 million) in ticket sales, Bait snagged more than $ 41.8 million worldwide, more than half of that in China.

“It was never going to get best film or best director, but how can the cinematography, the visual effects, the editing, the sound design, the production design – we built a supermarket and put it underwater, for goodness’ sake – be overlooked?” said Kimble Rendall to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Prior to last year, the awards were known as the Australian Film Industry (AFI) awards.

($ 1 = 0.9566 Australian dollars)

(Reporting By Jane Wardell, editing by Elaine Lies)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

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Readers may submit comments or questions for The Consumer by e-mail to consumer@nytimes.com.

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Blackberry 10 launches after long wait

Research In Motion Ltd unveiled the long-delayed line of smartphones it hopes will put it on the comeback trail on Wednesday but it disappointed investors by saying U.S. sales of its all-new BlackBerry 10 will start only in March.

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins also announced that RIM was abandoning the name it has used since its inception in 1985 to take the name of its signature product, signaling his hopes for a fresh start for the company that pioneered on-your-hip email.

"From this point forward, RIM becomes BlackBerry," Heins said at the New York launch. "It is one brand; it is one promise."

RIM, which is already starting to call itself BlackBerry, had initially planned to launch the new BlackBerry 10 smartphones in 2011. But it pushed the date back twice as it struggled to work with a new operating system.

Ahead of Wednesday's announcements, analysts had said that any launch after February would be a black mark for the Canadian company.

"The biggest disappointment was the delay in the U.S., that it will take so long before the devices get going there," said Eric Jackson, founder and managing Partner at Ironfire Capital LLC in New York.

Heins said the delays reflected the need for U.S. carrier testing, although carrier AT&T offered few clues on what that meant.

"We are very enthusiastic about the devices. We will announce pricing, availability, and other information at a later date. Beyond that, nothing to add," said spokesman Mark Siegel.

RIM launched its first BlackBerry back in 1999 as a way for busy executives to stay in touch with their clients and their offices, and the Canadian company quickly cornered the market for secure corporate and government email.

But its star faded as competition rose. The BlackBerry is now a far-behind also-ran in the race for market share, with a 3.4 percent global showing in the fourth quarter, down from 20 percent three years before. Its North American market share is even worse: a mere 2 percent in the fourth quarter.

RIM shares tumbled along with the company's market share, and the stock is down 90 percent from its 2008 peak.

The shares fell as much as 8 percent on Wednesday, although they are still more than twice the level of their September 2012 low, reflecting ever-louder buzz about the new devices.

TOUCH COMPETITION

The new BlackBerry 10 phones will compete with Apple's iPhone and devices using Google's Android technology, both of which have soared above the BlackBerry in a competitive market.

The BlackBerry 10 devices boast fast browsers, new features, smart cameras and, unlike previous BlackBerry models, enter the market primed with a large application library, including services such as Skype and the popular game Angry Birds.

The BlackBerry Z10 touchscreen device, in black or white, will be the first to hit the market, with a country-by-country roll-out that starts in Britain on Thursday.

A Q10 model, equipped with small "qwerty" keyboard that RIM made into its trademark, will launch globally in April.

The Z10 device won a lukewarm review from Wall Street Journal tech blogger Walt Mossberg, who complained of missing or lagging features and a shortage of apps.

But David Pogue, who writes for The New York Times, apologized for describing BlackBerry as doomed in the past. The Z10 touchscreen device was "lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas," he said.

Announcements about pricing so far have been in line with expectations. U.S. carrier Verizon Wireless said the phone would cost $199 for a two-year contract, while Canada's Rogers Communications is quoting C$149 ($150) for certain three-year plans.

GLITZY LAUNCH

RIM picked a range of venues for its global launch parties, including Dubai's $650-a-night Armani Hotel, which occupies six floors of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower.

The New York event took place in a sprawling basketball facility on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just north of the Manhattan Bridge. The BlackBerry has been "Re-designed. Re-engineered. Re-invented," RIM said.

RIM, which is splurging on a Superbowl ad to promote its new phones, also introduced Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Alicia Keys as its global creative director.

"I was in a long-term relationship with BlackBerry, and then I started to notice some new, kind of hotter, attractive, sexier phones at the gym, and I kind of broke up with you for something that had a little more bling," Keys said at the New York launch.

"But I always missed the way you organized my life, and the way you were there for me at my job, and so I started to have two phones - I was kind of playing the field. But then … you added a lot more features … and now, we're exclusively dating again, and I'm very happy."

RIMM data by YCharts

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1 dead, 2 wounded in Grand Crossing shooting

Chicago Police investigate near the body of a shooting victim on S. Champlain Avenue near 75th Street in Chicago. (Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune / January 29, 2013)

Staff report

1:45 p.m. CST, January 29, 2013

Three people were shot, one fatally, in the Grand Crossing neighborhood this afternoon, officials said.

The shooting happened around 12:10 p.m. in the 7500 block of South Champlain Avenue, and one of the victims was found in the 7500 block of South Langley, according to Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

One of the victims was dead on the scene, Langford said. The two others, both males, were taken in serious to critical condition to Stroger Hospital.

Police had one person in custody and were searching for another person, according to police, citing preliminary information. A gun was recovered.

"I head four or five shots. Then I heard the ambulance," one neighbor said. "I don't go outside when I hear shots."

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

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Apple announces iPad with double storage capacity

(Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday that it will sell a version of its iPad tablet computer with 128 gigabytes of storage, which is twice the capacity of its existing models.

Apple, which has sold more than 120 million iPads so far, said that the new iPad will go on sale February 5, in black or white, for a suggested retail price of $ 799 for the iPad with just Wi-Fi model, and $ 929 for the version that also has a cellular wireless connection.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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