Touchscreen and keyboard-equipped BlackBerry 9800 heading for August 3 debut

by Steven Mostyn - Jul 29 2010, 06:20

If analyst observations of the tech industry are anything to go by – and they usually are – Canadian smartphone manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) is preparing to push a potentially iPhone-rivalling BlackBerry handset into the media spotlight.

According to Tavis McCourt of Morgan Keegan & Co., that’s exactly what RIM is planning to do during an upcoming August 3 press event in New York. He also believes the mystery handset will be yet another attempt by the company to garner success via a touch-screen interface.

“I would suspect this would be the new BlackBerry 9800, a touch-screen slider phone,” offered McCourt regarding the event, which will be presented alongside leading carrier AT&T.

The BlackBerry 9800 is expected to carry RIM’s new BlackBerry OS 6 operating platform, along with a 360x480 touch-screen display, built-in Wi-Fi, a 5.0 mega-pixel camera, 4GBs of internal and expandable memory, and onboard GPS capabilities.

The BlackBerry product portfolio, which is predominantly filled with handsets sporting physical QWERTY keyboards, has thus far failed to register an unequivocal success when venturing into touch-screen territory – with the Storm and Storm2 quickly fading into the shadow of Apple’s iPhone.

The official introduction of BlackBerry OS 6 is expected to see RIM rolling out an overhauled WebKit browsing platform, which should address one of the core complaints levelled at the Storm handsets and their clunky user interfaces.

And, by way of covering its bases on interfacing, RIM’s BlackBerry 9800 and its touch-screen display should also be supported by the inclusion of a full slide-out keyboard.

The arrival of the BlackBerry 9800, if received favourably by both critics and consumers, should enable RIM to re-establish itself at the more desirable end of the smartphone spectrum – where its products have been pushed from the limelight by the likes of Apple’s iPhone and increasingly popular Android-equipped smartphones.

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