Blackberry steals iPhone's virtual keyboard

What a minute. I thought that the Blackberry keyboard was the reference design that high-volume tappers preferred for their littany of email, SMS and IM communication? In an apparent nod to the iPhone, the forthcoming Blackberry Thunder dispenses with their iconic, hardware QWERTY keyboard for – GASP, get this – an on-screen virtual keyboard.

It's not available yet (the shot above is from "a fairly early build of the Thunder's 4.7 OS") and all of their other models use a traditional hardware keyboard. But is the Thunder a sign of things to come from RIM? Is it a tacit acknowledgment that there could be something to the soft keyboard phenomenon? Or is RIM just trying to steal a little but of iPhone's thunder?

Thunder has some nice advancements in their soft keyboard that Apple should learn from, including haptic feedback (this should be easy for Apple to implement in software) and...

when you press on the Thunder's screen, it pushes in "just" a little bit (the whole screen is sort of like a big button) and you get immediate "real" feedback - you hear an audible clickety sound, and can feel a buzz in your finger where you actually pressed on the display.

(Picture: Crackberry.com)