Photo Leaks of BlackBerry Colt, RIM's first BBX Superphone, But Don't Expect it For Another Year

The word "Colt" has been flying around in BlackBerry rumours for a few months now, and N4BB recently picked up some new alleged specs to the device.

The Colt—whether this is a prototype name or not remains to be seen—is expected to be RIM's first "Superphone." Bell once defined Superphones with three core requirements: a large, high-res multitouch screen, a dual-core processor, and 4G compatibility. The Colt should have all of this—although early prototypes ran on a single-core processor—plus RIM's next-gen software platform, BBX.

The 4.0-inch screen (or larger) will be high-res, possibly as high-res as the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook (for app developers' sake). It will also be thinner than the Bold 9900, currently RIM's thinnest device, although I wonder if there is such a thing as "too thin" in terms of ergonomics. And it won't just share screen resolution similarities with the PlayBook; it will also apparently share the same battery.

The Colt will have no physical buttons, instead using a swipe-from-bezel feature (again, a la PlayBook) to access the homescreen. There will be a front and a back camera, BGR says, with flash and focus, but no hard specs on that component of the device. On the exterior, the superphone will feature a stainless steel ring around its unibody (think iPhone 4's aluminum band and the Bold 9900's carbon copy of it).

It sounds like RIM's best effort to date, but timing could again cripple the Waterloo company from competing in the mobile space. Current reports suggest that the soonest it could launch would be "mid-2012," at which point we could be seeing the iPhone 5 (2012 WWDC in the summer) and a dozen new Android-powered "superphones."

As is always with RIM—much to their chagrin—time will tell.

Photo: N4BB