I'm sorry. I was wrong.

This apology is for the bespectacled student at my talk in Cleveland, and the lady in the red dress in Florida, and anyone else who's recently asked me about the future of the BlackBerry. I told all of them the same thing: that it's doomed.

Once dominant, the BlackBerry has slipped to a single-digit percentage of the smartphone market. Its stock has crashed almost 90% from its 2008 peak. In the last two years, the BlackBerry's maker, Research in Motion, released a disastrous tablet, laid off thousands of employees and fired its CEOs.

The company -- which changed its name on Wednesday to simply BlackBerry -- kept saying that it had a miraculous new BlackBerry in the wings with a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. But it was delayed and delayed and delayed.

Well, BlackBerry's Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. It's the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It's lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas.

And here's the shocker -- it's complete.

The iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all entered life missing important features. Not this one; BlackBerry couldn't risk building a lifeboat with leaks. So it's all here: a well-stocked app store, a music and movie store, Mac and Windows software for loading files, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, parental controls, copy and paste, Find My Phone (with remote-control lock and erase) and on and on.

The hardware is all here, too. The BlackBerry's 4.2-inch screen is even sharper than the iPhone's vaunted Retina display (356 pixels per inch versus 326). Both front and back cameras can film in high definition (1080p back, 720p front).

Some of BlackBerry 10's ideas are truly ingenious. A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something is waiting for you.

There are no individual app icons for Messages or Mail. Instead, all communication channels (including Facebook, Twitter and phone calls) are listed in the Hub -- a master in-box list that appears at the left edge when you swipe inward. Each reveals how many new messages await and offers a one-tap jump into the corresponding app. It's a one-stop command center that makes eminent sense.

The BlackBerry's big selling point has always been its physical keyboard. The company says it will, in fact, sell a model with physical keys (and a smaller screen) called the Q10.

But you might not need it. On the all-touch-screen model, BlackBerry has come up with a mind-bogglingly clever typing system. Stay with me here:

As you type a word, tiny, complete words appear over certain on-screen keys -- guesses as to the word you're most likely to want. If you've typed "made of sil," for example, the word "silicone" appears over the letter I key, "silver" over the V, and "silk" over the K. You can fling one of these words into your text by flicking upward from the key -- or ignore it and keep typing.

How well does it work? I type 20 characters; it typed 61 for me.

There's speech recognition, too.

The camera software is terrific. One feature, Time Shift, is mind-blowing. You take a photo of people -- then, with your finger on a face, you can dial forward or backward up to two seconds in time, seeking that perfect expression. You repeat with the next face, and the next, until you've dialed up the perfect fraction of a second, independently, for each person in the shot. Admit it: that's brilliant.

There are some missteps. There's no physical silencer switch (only a software function). In the Mail app, you can't move from one message to the next without returning to the in-box in between.

But the usual Achilles' heel for a new type of smartphone is the apps. Who could catch up with the 750,000 apps available for iPhone or Android? Incredibly, BlackBerry says that there will be 70,000 apps available on Day One. The company shrewdly wrote a utility program that can convert Android apps, making it simple for programmers to adapt their wares.

So then: Is the delightful BlackBerry Z10 enough to save its company?

Honestly? It could go either way. But this much is clear: BlackBerry is no longer an incompetent mess -- and its doom is no longer assured.