The BoyGenius has always been pretty reliable when it comes to details about upcoming BlackBerry devices. He just posted some details one of his contacts told him about the upcoming BlackBerry slider phone idea that RIM is toying around with. This is not the first we have heard about it and will probably not be the last.
The contact had this to say about the slider:
- The slider will be portrait oriented kind of like the Palm Pre
- The phone will run OS 6.0 (Not sure what that means)
- It will support 802.11n Wi-Fi
- Resolution of 360×480
- This might just be a evolution of the Magnum/Dakota models
- It will be a GSM device not a Verizon exclusive
What do you think? Personally I really like the 9700 device design. Do we really need to shake it up again?
arulkl ( View Profile) Newcomer - Posts: 12
Posted: February 26, 2010 at 9:55 AM EST
I wonder if it will be as thin as the 9700? Maybe slightly thicker is ok.
KingB Not Registered
Posted: February 26, 2010 at 11:55 AM EST
if its OS5 based, its at least 6 months away. If its OS6 based, its at least 1 year away.
I just got a wild idea… should RIM buy Palm? their new OS platform issues would dissapear in an instant…
SirPedro ( View Profile) Newcomer - Posts: 20
Posted: February 26, 2010 at 1:23 PM EST from my BlackBerry 9700
I’m wondering if its coming to T-Mobile. If so when? I need that in my life and in my collection.
RANDOPLH Not Registered
Posted: February 26, 2010 at 2:44 PM EST
I would love to see the storm with a slide down keypad like the sprint moment. I think it would out sell almost any phone on the market easy! Just my opinion.
Cadillac Cowboy ( View Profile) Newcomer - Posts: 75
Posted: February 26, 2010 at 7:20 PM EST
I like the idea of a device with a touch-screen AND a physical keyboard, however if it is a SLIDER keyboard, I’m cautious about the design – we don’t get a whole lot of the Palm Pre-style devices here and the last one I used (a good 5+ years ago, an i-mate PDA2k – see http://www.gsmarena.com/i_mate_pda2k-962.php ) wasn’t all that comfortable when it came to holding the device and/or using the keyboard…
Most of the dual-input devices I’ve used either have fixed keyboard (BlackBerry Bold 9000-style), or have Motorola Milestone (“Droid”)-style keyboards, to which I’ve been accustomed.
Like I said above though, it’s been 5+ years since I’ve used a device with a SLIDER keyboard, so who knows, maybe they’re pretty good these days?
Anyway, I love the bigger screen – it looses the “cute” factor and is probably isn’t as “pocketable”, but in this day and age where everything’s going all multimedia-like, a bigger screen is ALWAYS a good thing (particularly if the said screen supports touch-based input)…
Research in Motion (RIM) would want to increase the resolution of the screen significantly if it wants to stay ahead of the games – VGA or similar is fast becoming the new standard for high-end smartphones.
Offering usage times similar to “traditional” (ie. 2G/2.5G) BlackBerry devices (such as the BlackBerry Curve 8300) would also do wonders for RIM, as that has always been a strong point for RIM and many recent devices have gone to the other extreme, offering pathetic usage times (the BlackBerry Bold 9000 being one such example…)!
Bryan Not Registered
Posted: February 27, 2010 at 11:28 PM EST
If they made a slider like just add a full slide out keyboard in landscape mode to the Storm and still made it touch-screen, WiFi-N, and World… Add some RAM, stop making all programs run off of the internal RAM and let them run off a memory card, wow! I’d so buy that rather than looking into the replacement for the Tour!
Cadillac Cowboy ( View Profile) Newcomer - Posts: 75
Posted: February 28, 2010 at 12:07 AM EST
Agreed, that’d be pretty impressive… Not so fussed about being able to run applications from removable storage though – in my opinion, Research in Motion (RIM) just need to build-in 1GB+ exclusively for application storage and running them (not such a hard task, especially seeing as flash memory is so cheap these days!).
Having applications on removable storage often means more stuffing around when upgrading one’s memory card, when updating or upgrading one’s firmware.