BOOM! Last week's leaked 2012 BlackBerry Roadmap slide deck brought with it a ton of goodies for the new year, but one thing that was missing was a fresh look at a BlackBerry 10 Smartphone Superphone. Consider it found though, with the slide above featuring an image and some details on the much-rumored about BlackBerry "London".
The story here isn't cut and dry though. Back in November a first photo of a BlackBerry London dummy unit hit the internet, but that BBX phone -- it wasn't re-labeled BlackBerry 10 yet -- featured a hardware design that was quite different than the phone in the image above. The first photo of London featured angular edges and a design language more akin to the uber-expensive Porsche Design P'9981 Smartphone by BlackBerry.
By contrast, the BlackBerry London in the image above looks much more like a phonified BlackBerry PlayBook, featuring the rounded corners and all-black look of RIM's first tablet. And while we heard the first photo of London was a legit RIM hardware concept, we've been hearing for an even longer time now that the first QNX-based phone hardware was more like a downsized PlayBook. Who's knows. Maybe by the time it hits we'll see the design evolve yet again. The plot thickens.
All confusion aside though, our excitement is building for the next-generation of BlackBerry phones that are due out later this year. Word has it that London is actually slated for the UK (go figure), while two other models -- "Laguna" and "Lisbon" are in development for the US market targeting AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. We wouldn't be surprised at all to see Laguna and Lisbon actually launched prior to London. With BlackBerry still the #1 Smartphone in the UK, it's in America that RIM needs to first make a big splash with BlackBerry 10.
Talking hardware for a moment, we're hearing that both TI OMAP5 and Qualcomm chipsets are being tested (1.5GHz dual core processors). If we look ahead by looking at BlackBerry history, it could be that Qualcomm is for the CDMA carriers. All we know is that with the BlackBerry PlayBook rocking and rolling the PlayBook OS at 1Ghz, that with 1.5Ghz as a baseline BlackBerry 10 phones will not be lacking in the performance department.
Keep it locked to CrackBerry. You know we're gonna be Rocking & Rolling This!!
