We're not sure why the
Wall Street Journal just posted up a piece talking about
BlackBerry OS 6.0 and the
Bold 9800 QWERTY slider as though we haven't been running
leaked pictures and
videos of them for
months now, but whatever -- the story also apparently confirms RIM's
Foleo-like tablet plans and says the device could be out by the end of the year. Sounds like RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis decided the tablet market is a little clearer than he's
been letting on. As we've heard in the past, the tablet will tether to your phone for connectivity instead of sporting its own 3G connection, which is interesting, given that RIM is notoriously proud of how little bandwidth its phones use, and we're guessing a full-screen tablet experience might use just a little more data than the average Pearl. Plus, it would be pretty wild if RIM ended up validating a Palm product idea so seemingly doomed that the company
killed it dead just four months after
it was announced in 2007 -- we're not saying the times haven't changed dramatically, but we'd note the
Celio RedFly has thus far failed to blow up the universe. We'll see -- the
WSJ also says the tablet is in the "early stages of development," so anything can change.
