For the release of BlackBerry 10, BlackBerry decided to go ahead and offer something special to developers in order to help get them started with developing for the platform. The initial device, the BlackBerry Dev Alpha A was announced on May 1st, 2012 in Orlando and since then has spawned several different versions including the BlackBerry Dev Alpha B as well as the BlackBerry Dev Alpha C which takes on the full QWERTY form factor. In the beginning, the BlackBerry Dev Alpha ran a stripped down version of BlackBerry 10 but as the OS evolved it was updated to offer fully running and almost fully functional versions of the BlackBerry 10 OS to support developers in creating and testing applications for the BlackBerry 10 platform.