Canadians with aging BlackBerrys finally have the option of an upgrade.  The BlackBerry Z10 goes on sale today in stores across the country.

Some analysts have been concerned that BlackBerry’s launch came too late to recover the lustre of its name.  But anecdotes from the UK, where the phone launched last week, suggest the new BlackBerry is selling at a steady pace.  Pierre Ferragu is a senior analyst at Bernstein Research.  He’s upgraded the company to “outperform” with a target price of 22-dollars a share, saying he’s grown more confident in the likely success of the Blackberry 10 launch.

BlackBerry shares jumped yesterday ahead of today’s launch in Canada.  Our financial analyst Kim Parlee also explained that the name change from RIM to BlackBerry became official.  “For the longest time we’ve known Research In Motion for years, and they changed their symbol to BB in Toronto and BBRY trading in the United States.  And the stock, which I think has been down about 22% and change over the past few days, is up 13%.  Some people are calling it the Super Bowl bounce.  There was a Super Bowl ad for what they call the (Zee) 10 in the United States.”

Canadian fans of the BlackBerry’s traditional keyboard will have to wait awhile longer though the new keypad version of the Z10 won’t launch until sometime in April.