RIM quietly teases BlackBerry 9380 and 9790
Makers of BlackBerry smartphones, RIM, has revealed scant details of two of its upcoming handsets on its developer blog.
The details appeared on the Inside BlackBerry Developer's Blog on Friday, revealing that the next two devices will arrive running the BlackBerry 7 operating system. The post was intended to allow developers to get their apps ready for the new handsets ahead of launch.
"To enable developers to start testing and optimising their BlackBerry applications for two upcoming smartphones, we are now releasing a beta of the new BlackBerry simulators, and encourage you to check out BlackBerry Developer Zone for more information," 'Brian Z', a senior member of the developer relations team, said.
"In addition, we have opened up BlackBerry App World to enable vendors to start posting their applications for sale in time to be included for consideration in launch activities for both of these upcoming devices," he added.
The first of the new devices, the 9380 — rumoured to be called the Curve Touch 9380 — will have a 3.2-inch display, made up of 480-by-360 pixels in portrait view. It will be an all-touch device and will not have a keyboard.
The second handset, the 9970, will feature the same screen resolution as the 9380, but the display itself will be smaller, at just 2.44-inches. The handset is currently rumoured to be called the 'Bellagio' and will combine a touchscreen display with RIM's standard Qwerty keyboard.
Pricing, release and other features of the upcoming handsets were not detailed in the blog post.
On Monday, the company said it would offer consumer customers more than $100 (£63) worth of apps from Blackberry App World as an apology for the three days of downtime that left users without data services, including email sent over the secure BES system. Enterprise customers will also get one month of free technical support.
The company said the unprecedented downtime was caused by the failure of "a dual-redundant high-capacity core switch", the company said on Thursday.