Blackberry Enters The World Of Touch

BlackBerry should be renamed LeakBerry. Photos, videos and technical specifications have been leaked over and over in the past few weeks. Rumors are flying. There are now stories of four new RIM Smartphones (BlackBerry Bold Touch, Torch 2, Orlando, and Touch), all of which have new capacitive touch screens. Mostly they seem to be re-made versions of the Curve and Torch, although there is a touch only phone as well.

BlackBerry Enters the World of Touch

The BlackBerry Orlando is mostly a Curve Sedona with a touch screen. It is supposed to ship with the new OS 6.1, have a physical keyboard and a trackpad. With the touch screen and the keyboard, it is kind of a mini-Bold Torch.

The new touch screen only BlackBerry is called the Touch or the CDMA version, the Monaco Touch. It appears to be more like an Android or iPhone device, using capacitive technology. It is reported to be coming with a 3.7 inch screen, 800480 pixel resolution, 1.2 GHz processor, 768 MB of RAM, a MicrosSD slot, and a 5 megapixel camera.

The Bold Touch has some nice new features, including a new battery type. Its a GSM device with a 5MP camera, 4GB of internal storage, 768MB or RAM, a 2.8-inch screen (640480), and according to an article written by Jeffrey Van Camp, DigitalTrends, it has built in NFC technology. Since Apple has decided not to include the NFC yet, this will be a bonus for RIM. NFC is near field communication which allows your Smartphone to communicate with terminals like cash registers, helping you to avoid long lines in restaurants and such.

The unit itself is extremely solid and the touchscreen is very responsive, said BGR (Boy Genius Reports). And who could forget that great and spacious BlackBerry keyboard? The BlackBerry Bold Touch also uses a new battery from RIM, so hopefully the addition of a touchscreen to this famous BlackBerry form factor wont have too much of a negative impact on battery life.

The Storm 3 Touch is also known as Blackberry Touch 9860. Heres a short video preview of the new Storm 3:

BlackBerry has die-hard fans. If you are one of those BlackBerry users and like the BlackBerry keyboard, you will probably want to upgrade to the new Smartphones with both the touch screen and the keyboard. If you are new to BlackBerry and have been an iPhone user or an Android user, you will probably want to try the new BlackBerry Touch Smartphones. Will the new efforts by BlackBerry to stay in the market be enough to keep up with the Androids and iPhones? Google reports that there are currently 350,000 new device activations per day, and 3 billion apps overall have been installed. iPhone is trying to keep up. Will BlackBerry succeed? Let us know what you think.