More details are emerging online of RIM’s new touchscreen phone, the Blackberry Thunder.
A photo leaked on Boygenius shows the new phone to have – gasp! – no QWERTY keyboard, with the front of the unit dominated by a large LCD screen, with four small buttons underneath.
From left to right, these are ‘Send’ (to call a highlighted number), ‘Menu’ (to view the menu options in an application), ‘Escape’ (to move back a screen or to close a menu) and a multifunction ‘End/Power’ key which returns users to the hone screen, ends a call or turns the device on or off.
When it comes to technical details and spec sheets, there’s currently jack diddly squat available, but if it’s packing similar hi-tech innards as the impressive Bold, RIM could be on a bit of a winner.
Looking at the leaked photo, we can see that there’s a screen lock/unlock key on the top left of the phone and a play/pause control on the opposite side.
Along the left hand side there’s a USB port and ‘Left Convenience Key’ which can be used to open a user-defined application. The right hand side of the phone sports a second ‘Convenience Key’ along with a headset jack and volume keys.
Unless there’s a sneaky slide-out keyboard lurking underneath, this will be the first RIM phone to launch without a physical keyboard, something that might miff off their traditional user base of heavy duty business emailers.
However, we can’t imagine Blackberry fobbing off their loyal consumers with a shoddy Windows Mobile-style keypad, so we’re thinking that they might have something a bit nifty up their sleeves, with the phone perhaps packing haptic feedback at the very least.
As for price and availability, well, you may as well ask Drunken Jack the one legged cider man, because we haven’t a clue.