So, Joe made a post this morning about how the BlackBerry 9000 will reportedly not have a touchscreen after reading a post about the leaked pictures of the model at Electronista. Electronista reported:
A photo allegedly taken near the company’s Waterloo, Canada campus reveals a device that offers a major redesign of the BlackBerry Curve but retains the chief formula equipped with a conventional screen, it also keeps the trackball of the earlier model but includes larger, easier to hit keys on its keypad and is thinner overall than its predecessors.
We’re not quite sure where they obtained that information as the “leak” on the BlackBerry forums never said in the initial reports where the picture had come from. He only left the picture and then in a subsequent post, claimed to have seen the same device (though never saying the one in the picture) in use at the Waterloo offices of RIM.
When subsequent posts pointed out the picture had actually come from an ebay auction, the original poster admitted to lifting the picture from the auction, but kept with his story that it was indeed the 9000 series phone he has seen in use in Waterloo.
Later in the thread, member cheshillsgolf mentioned:
Take a look at “BlackBerry” on the top of the device. It appears that the “B” in Berry is backwards. I smell photoshop
And then Cooper (not the Cooper in the BB forums thread) Lang – one of the guys in our office – mentioned that he had thought so too, and that he also noticed that unlike any other BB we had seen before (as the comments will show below, I don’t look at the curve much – apologies), this one also had the RIM/BB logo to the left of the “BlackBerry” (edited to add: which would help support the claim that it is a curve). We blew up the picture in photoshop and sure enough, the second B in BlackBerry does indeed appear to be backwards. We’ve pointed out the oddities oddity below (click the picture for an enlarged version).
The picture certainly does appear photoshopped, but it also makes no sense that an ebay seller with a very high number of auctions and a very low number of negative feedback scores would be selling a phone with a photoshopped picture. So, does the new 9000 series have the BB logo next to the word “BlackBerry” now? Is the backwards B some way of identifying prototypes? Is this even the 9000 series at all? Guess we have to wait and see.
