RIM apparently wants its first clamshell smartphone, BlackBerry KickStart, to be a smash-hit in terms of sales, as the Canadian company might be offering the device for only $49.99, with a T-Mobile USA contract agreement for two years.

This is no official news yet, but it's highly probable to be true, as CrackBerry reports that lots of sources have confirmed it.

Generally, smartphones have prices that not everyone can afford, hence the ones that actually don't cost too much are sold in lots of units. See the Palm Centro, for example, which passed the 1 million units sold mark a few months ago and it continues to sell well all over the world.

RIM's KickStart will be the first smartphone to have a $50 price tag with a contract agreement for 2-years (the Centro costs $99 with a similar contract), so it could very well be more popular than Palm's handset. Sure, the Centro falls into the candybar category, while the KickStart is a flip phone, but that shouldn't have any negative effects on the success of the latter. After all, Motorola sold more than 100 million RAZR clamshells, so people surely don't have anything against this form factor.

As for the features of KickStart, although you might expect them to be on the low-end side, they're not: a full Pearl-like QWERTY keypad, a 240 x 320 pixel TFT internal display, a 128 x 160 pixel external display, Wi-Fi, Music and Video players, a 3.5mm audio jack, a 2 Megapixel camera with video, quad-band GSM connectivity with EDGE, expandable memory and BlackBerry 4.6 OS.

We're now waiting for an official announcement regarding the BlackBerry KickStart, which should come either from Research in Motion or from T-Mobile - the first US carrier to offer the new smartphone).