BlackBerry Kickstart! A Glimpse of RIMs Future?!

Well here it is folks, visual proof that Research in Motion is going to start leveraging that World's 51st Most-Recognized Brand Reputation to the max. What you're looking at here are leaked photos of a BlackBerry clamshell flip phone.

The Boy Genius has been on a roll this week, and now he's brought forth these photos of what he says has been codenamed the BlackBerry Kickstart. We're talking SureType keyboard, trackball navigation, camera, external LCD and a good looking internal LCD, and the thickish base of the phone leads me to think its sporting a big battery which screams 3G (or hopefully 3G to come!)... this thing looks like a Feature Phone on Steroids! What's really amazing here is that a release date BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR is being rumored. I'm liking the Kickstart name A LOT too... I hope that name sticks. There's not much info to go off of at this point, but it would seem this phone would be targeted as an introductory smartphone (a.k.a. Palm Centro market) or in other words, a nice Kickstart into the world of smarterphones for all those feature phone users out there.

Think back to the .alx file digging Jibi was doing recently where references were made of a 9100 and "external" display. Does that make the 9100 the Kickstart?! Then what will the AK Apple Killer touchscreen BlackBerry be called? So many rumors... I can't wait to see these devices be released for real.

More pics after the jump, and I'm sure now that this is out in the open more details will start emerge by the minute. Keep your browsers locked here for info as it arrives!

BlackBerry Kickstart Images