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BlackBerry Bold 9780 leaks out with OS 6, QWERTY instead of touchscreen
Take this one with a grain of salt, but it's looking like our old friend the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is getting a wee bit of an update. Yesterday evening, CrackBerry discovered a RIM document that describes a QWERTY-packing, OS 6-rocking "BlackBerry 9780" destined for a GSM carrier near you... and less than 24 hours later, handset sleuth Salomondrin claims to have the first picture of the device. While we quite honestly can't tell the difference, the man who outed the Curve 2 says this device's chrome bezel is a tad darker than the original, and that it'll have 512MB of flash memory when it hits the scene. Of course, this could just be an Bold 9700 with a hacked ROM or a theme of some sort, but we certainly hope not; pepper it up with CDMA, and you've got a shoe-in for the Curve 3. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
RIM shows off BlackBerry 6 multimedia experience, in pictures
While there's still no (official) word on when we'll get any BlackBerry OS 6 hardware, much less that 9800 Bold, RIM has seen fit to provide us another glimpse at the software front. This time round we're looking at multimedia features, including the photo gallery, a brand-new podcasts app and YouTube, alongside extra camera controls (including a face detection mode) and roundabout confirmation that at least some new BlackBerries will support pinch-to-zoom. Oddly enough, there's no video showing off the new multimedia functionality, just a set of stills, but we suppose RIM realizes it's all been done before and Crackberry addicts will take whatever they can get right now.
BlackBerry Bold 9800 caught sliding through OS 6 on video
When it rains Bold 9800 news, it pours. Just yesterday we were given a glimpse of its virtual keyboard and AT&T branding, and now BlackBerry's upcoming slider can be seen more fleshed out thanks to the power of moving pictures. No narration for this video -- that's either good or bad, depending on your own personal preference -- and the horizontal menu swipe looks like it's missing some animation, but otherwise the phone's looking pretty snappy for a pre-release. Unless we're mistaken, that's clearly a capacitive screen, and even better, it's got pinch-and-zoom multitouch. Not in the video? Some Dylan-esque troubadour holding up a cue card that gives price and release date. Bummer. Video after the break.
Switched On: Revamps in Motion
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Before the iPhone's release, there were four major smartphone operating systems -- Symbian, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry OS. And after the iPhone's release, their user interfaces all seemed dated in some way. Palm OS and Windows Mobile have essentially been replaced by new operating systems dubbed WebOS and Windows Phone 7. Symbian stakeholders, though, has decided that there is no need to throw out the past completely, and are instead looking toward a series of evolutionary upgrades to make the now open source operating system more competitive. This week at RIM's WES conference, the company is announcing a similar evolutionary path for the BlackBerry OS. Like Symbian, the BlackBerry OS has a reputation for being fast and efficient but has not kept up with many of the aesthetic and input amenities offered by more modern competitors. The challenge will be to preserve what users love about the platform while disrupting it in many ways. For example, while the new BlackBerry OS will be better optimized for touchscreens, reports are that it will not require one.
