BlackBerry KickStart Surfaces Again

BlackBerry KickStart, the first smartphone to come from RIM in a clamshell form factor, has recently been seen in a set of new leaked images, at BerryShack, making us think that its official announcement is getting closer.

The new KickStart will surely be available in the US via T-Mobile, since it was spotted several times with T-Mo's logo on it, but an exact release date is not known for the moment.

When closed, the KickStart has a slightly curved shape and, judging form the available images, it's about 100 millimeters long (less than 4 inches). When flipped, the smartphone becomes quite long, probably having almost 200 millimeters in length.

Among the unconfirmed features that RIM has packed in its first clamshell, we have: an internal main LCD display with a QVGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels), an external display with 128 x 160 pixels, the latest BalckBerry 4.6 OS, a full QWERTY keypad resembling the ones used in the Pearl series of smartphones, a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, Wi-Fi and a 3.5mm audio jack. The KickStart will apparently bring only GSM connectivity with GPRS and EDGE, but let's hope this is not true and RIM hasn't omitted to put in some 3G flavor, too.

The leaked images appeared until now showed two color versions of the BlackBerry KickStart: silver and black. But knowing that RIM is generous when it comes to colors, we might see the KickStart pink or red, for instance.

Together with the BlackBerry Bold 9000 (already confirmed) and the Thunder touchscreen smartphone (not yet confirmed), the KickStart will probably be part of RIM's new-generation line-up of products. The Canadian company's financial results for the first quarter of 2008 are more than satisfying and, in order to keep them this way in the future, RIM will have to constantly come up with attractive handsets. Let's wait then to see if the KickStart can fall into this category.