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WES is the biggest BlackBerry show of the year so it only make sense that RIM's head honchos all be on hand. While RIM's Founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis will speak tomorrow morning during the general assembly keynote (we'll be live blogging it,) he spoke to analysts during Capital Markets today. During the event he highlighted a couple of interesting statistics, showed off a preview of BlackBerry 6 (hopefully this will be in the keynote tomorrow and we'll bring you a video) and from their handled some pretty intense Q&A. Some of the big takeaways:

  • App World Downloads - RIM has never been one to hand out App World statistics, but apparently now they are and they aren't too shabby. Mike said App World is delivering a million downloads per day.
  • OS 6.0 Availability - Coming in the next calendar quarter.
  • OS 6.0 Input - As thought (and makes sense) OS 6.0 will work on touch and non-touch devices.
  • OS 6.0 Backwards Compatibility - It seems the analysts in the room had the same burning question we have in terms of what current in-market devices will get OS 6.0. Mike L. didn't answer the question directly, but did make it clear that RIM will continue to do what they always do - carry on support for older devices as it makes sense (within memory limitations). So expect to see 6.0 launch on a new device and from there we'll see it trickle out to at least some current devices.
  • WebKit clarification - Mike L. clarified that the WebKit browser is an integrated part of OS 6.0. It's not a standalone app (you won't be able to install the WebKit browser on OS 5.0 for example). He further elloborated saying that it's not really a "webkit browser" but a WebKit rendering engine, which can be/is leveraged in areas/apps beyond just the browser.
Lots of interesting stuff here that we'll try and follow up with more detail on over the next couple of days. If you want to dig into the nitty gritty, you can listen to the whole keynote above.