Posted on April 8, 2009, at 3:31 pm .
Simon put up a great post about the soon-to-be-official BlackBerry Storm 2. A RIM sales manager from the Netherlands has acknowledged the second coming of the BlackBerry Storm at the TeleVisie 2009 conference. He says it will come in late 2009 or early 2010 and hints at SureType keyboard improvement and WiFi inclusion - both of which were previously rumored.
Some analysts are guessing the new Storm will use both a touchscreen and a QWERTY keypad a la HTC Touch Pro.
Do you think the BlackBerry Storm would be significantly improved with a QWERTY keypad?
[Via]
Posted on October 17, 2008, at 8:26 am .
Jinkies, it looks like we weren’t totally sniffing the wrong tree when we pointed to 2009 as a possibility for a touchscreen BlackBerry on Rogers. Both BGR and BlackBerry News have posted today about a previously unseen BlackBerry that is reported to make an appearance at WES 2009: the BlackBerry Magnum.
So what exactly is the BlackBerry Magnum? Apparently only a U.S. HSDPA, BlackBerry Curve 8900 form factor with a BlackBerry Storm-like touchscreen. Which, although exciting, kind of sounds like a souped-up Palm Treo. Anyways, the amount of BlackBerrys RIM is looking to release is making my head spin. We’ll tell you more as we learn it.
(via BBNews, BGR)
Posted on July 13, 2008, at 4:32 pm .
Proving that bloggers aren’t willing to take the weekend off, CrackBerry has produced two new screenshots of the BlackBerry Thunder (or possibly the BlackBerry Storm). If the images tell us one thing, it’s that RIM is dedicating a lot of the Thunder’s screen real estate for text input, likely in an effort to assuage fears of the ‘keypad or nothing’ crowd. Here’s a recap of what’s known about the BlackBerry Thunder’s touchscreen:
Haptic Response - Featuring haptic feedback, the Thunder’s screen pushes in and creates an audible clickety sound and vibration upon input.
Full QWERTY and SureType Entry - As the images show, full QWERTY in landscape mode and SureType entry in portrait mode. Screen/keyboard orientation can be changed at any time.
Multi-touch Glass Screen - Similar to the iPhone, the BlackBerry Thunder will utilize WebKit for it’s browser engine and a glass screen.
OS 4.7 - A little one-upmanship to the BlackBerry Bold’s OS 4.6, likely for the inclusion of touchscreen support.
(via CrackBerry)
Click here for another BlackBerry Thunder touchscreen picture!
Posted on July 10, 2008, at 2:08 pm .
Obviously, as bloggers, we’re forced to deal with many rumors and half-truths in order to bring you the latest in BlackBerry news. However, the ongoing confusion over RIM’s upcoming CDMA touchscreen device is becoming almost too much to bear.
At first, we thought it was to be called the BlackBerry Storm, then the BlackBerry Thunder. Then we were told its haptic keyboard was fantastic, only to have that idea shot down by the Internet’s resident Deep Throat, the Boy Genius. The gadget nuts over at Gizmodo have now thrown their hat into the ring, claiming through sources that the BlackBerry Thunder was in fact the Storm all along, it will not be delayed, and does, in fact, rock.
The only thing we can be sure of is that nothing is certain until we actually have the device in-hand. Jim-dog, you want to swing by BBCool HQ and give us a demo?
**Update** Boy Genius has now posted a PowerPoint slide as evidence of the BlackBerry Thunder’s namesake.
See BG’s rebuttal after the jump
Posted on July 9, 2008, at 9:28 am .
There have been reports of haptic feedback on the touchscreened BlackBerry Thunder, but development is still very early and not yet perfected. The unreleased device, rumoured to be available sometime this Winter on Verizon, will offer vibrations and clicks when typing on its virtual keypad, which will change from SureType to QWERTY depending on orientation. While that might be a nice consolation for a real keypad, word has it that the early betas aren’t going so smoothly. Regardless, there’s still a long time to go, and if it’s not ready for the rumoured release date, it will get “delayed” for when the Thunder is ready to roll.
(via BGR, CB)
Posted on July 7, 2008, at 11:03 am .
We might have caught a glimpse at the BlackBerry Thunder, but we’ve got a bit more eye candy, and is it looking slick, or what? The shots look like they came from a document detailing some of the OS 4.7 multimedia functions of the unreleased touchscreen BlackBerry due out sometime before Christmas for CDMA carriers. The BlackBerry Thunder will apparently be packing a glass 360 x 480 screen, which seems like more than enough for full videos. The media player will also feature carrier music stores, which would be a great way to grab tunes wirelessly to your device. When recording video, you’ll be able to preview the whole thing in landscape mode, too. Not too shabby at all.
The touchscreen has been a point of contention, both among handheld users as well as RIM’s execs, but one way or the other, there’s a market for touch devices, and with the BlackBerry Thunder, RIM is clearly on board. Between the flip BlackBerry Kickstart, the Curve-style BlackBerry Javelin, the upcoming Bold, and now the BlackBerry Thunder, it’s clear that there’s a wide array of tastes BlackBerrys can reach out to. So, who’s salivating?
(via BlackBerrySync)
A second BlackBerry Thunder pic after the jump!
Posted on June 11, 2008, at 9:28 am .
The Boy Genius continues to filter through the black swamp of tech rumors to deliver us the goods, this time with an update for the BlackBerry Thunder, the exclusive touch screen BlackBerry for Verizon he broke news of during WES.
A few things stand out: first, the Thunder will not have an external microSD slot, meaning you’re going to have to pop the battery to access it, as if it were a BlackBerry Curve. Once you’ve popped that battery, however, you’ll see a SIM card sitting next to it. BG has also heard that the BlackBerry will support CDMA 1x, EV-DO, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSPA, making it a very slick hybrid device. Of course, North American readers can forget about unlocking it for use on, say, AT&T: like the BlackBerry 8830, the Thunder will only use CDMA coverage while inside the great US of A — which doesn’t matter much seeing as the BlackBerry will only support the international 900/1800MHz bands with 2100MHz WCDMA band anyways.
BG is still saying Q3 release this year for the Thunder. We keep you in the know as more information develops.
(via Boy Genius Report)
Posted on June 9, 2008, at 8:29 am .
BG has done it again, leaking another exclusive picture of a nascent BlackBerry. This time, it’s the BlackBerry Thunder, which Boy Genius tells us is a dual mode (EV-DO Rev. C and GSM HSPA for international travel) touchscreen BlackBerry coming exclusively to Verizon Q3 of this year. Although it’s a mock-up, BG wouldn’t post it unless it was legit. Also, surprise surpise, it looks exactly like the one BG furnished when he originally broke the story during WES — it’s almost like he knew.
Post a comment and tell us what you think of the words touchscreen and BlackBerry being wrapped together in one nice, neat little package.
(via BoyGenius Report)
Posted on June 2, 2008, at 10:51 am .
Horizon Wireless recently opened up preorders for the BlackBerry 9500 “Thunder”, a device which hasn’t even been announced yet, and yeah, we’ve been hearing about a touchscreen BlackBerry for a couple of eons now, but this is the first even vaguely solid evidence to date. The picture is extra-blurred, and covered in the Horizon logo, so there’s really not much there to comment on… Blogworthiness aside, RIM did give Horizon the legal backhand to remove the pictures, so you gotta think there was some legitimacy to the snap after all. Supposedly the shots were of a dummy version (i.e. just the housing), so more info is sure to come once it gets some guts. Cheers Chris!
Posted on May 20, 2008, at 2:50 pm .
Folks were quick to point out the iPhone-esque bezel on the BlackBerry Bold, but RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis was equally quick to condemn those nay-sayers to an infernal pit of shame.
This is three years in the making. So I’m sorry but this wasn’t a response to another device. Either that or we have a time machine somewhere, or some kind of magic crystal ball or something. This was actually designed three years ago and the actual physical design of this product–I have the original models from 2006. … We have to be realistic about the history of [touchscreen] technology. We have to remember that this is not new–this has been done, this has been tried before. And there are other ways to provide a large screen and a Qwerty keyboard without compromising them by putting one on top of the other.
Of course, it might be a little trickier to say the same if the rumoured touchscreen Thunder comes to light, but then again, it does hint that if a touchscreen is in BlackBerry’s future, it won’t be in the way that the iPhone has established. It seems much more likely that a Treo-style keypad/touchscreen combo would happen before an iClone did.
So long as we’re talking about Mikey, there was another interview with the big kahuna at WES regarding his fave BlackBerry apps, which included Viigo, the top RSS reader for your BlackBerry… Pick it up! Cheers, Giz!
BBCool AppStore
