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RIM's Touch Screen Device Spotted

While the world had its eyes on San Francisco yesterday, another noteworthy gem popped up on the Internet. A new, but unannounced, touch screen device from Research In Motion was photographed and shared across the Web. My question is, does this device even have a chance against the new iPhone?

The Boy Genius and his minions have scored another coup. This time, they've come up with real images of the unannounced BlackBerry Thunder, the touch screen device that RIM has been working on seemingly forever. There's no doubt that it sports RIM's design language.

There are four keys along the bottom of the slab form factor: the send, BlackBerry, clear, and end keys. These will let you access the phone's menus and systems in a manner similar to existing BlackBerry devices. Gone is any sort of track pad or track ball, however. Instead, you'll be relying on your fingers to navigate menus on the screen, just as with the iPhone and other touch devices.

What's really cool is that it appears to have two touch-capacitance buttons along the top edge of the phone for locking the handset, as well as interacting with the device's music player.

Lastly, the Verizon logo appears prominently on the screen, so we know which network operator it's headed to.

Can this business-class device stand up to the challenge thrown down by the 3G iPhone, which supports many of the same enterprise features? It will all depend on the user interface. RIM's existing UI is getting a little stale. The new UI we've seen on the BlackBerry Bold appears to make some decent changes, but how RIM will integrate those changes into a touch-based device is anyone's guess. Other things will matter, too, such as its multimedia capabilities, its camera quality, and so on.

There will certainly be a market for this device from RIM. The question is, how large will it really be?

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