Research in Motion Ltd.'s (RIM) new operating system, BlackBerry 10, will be released later this year, the smartphone maker's new Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said.

Heins, who took the helm of the Canadian company in January, didn't give a specific launch date for Blackberry 10.

Speaking at a BlackBerry European developer conference in Amsterdam in one of his first public appearances as the company's CEO, Heins said BlackBerry 10 would be "focusing on a seamless experience" for users of multiple devices, like the company's latest smartphones and PlayBook tablet computers, as well as embedded devices and cloud computing.

Research in Motion's latest operating system is BlackBerry 7.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company has been facing increasingly strong competition from Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) devices and devices that run on Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Android operating system, causing its market capitalization to shrink sharply in 2011.

Heins said at the Amsterdam conference the smartphone market is still young with good growth prospects.