As we all know, there are three basic types of Blackberry phone. There’s touchscreen superduperphones, like the Blackberry Storm 2. There’s QWERTY-ed up beasties, like the Bold and Curve ranges. Annnnnnd, there’s ones with a SureType keyboard, like the world famous Pearl. With the latter two categories, getting round the menu was done by using either a trackball or, in more recent incarnations, a touchpad. But what happens if you put a touchscreen on a QWERTY-ed up Blackberry?
You get that beastie over there to the right.
Now, before we go any further, I should say that the phone in the title of this blog post, the rumoured Blackberry Dakota, isn’t the phone in the picture. You may be asking why I’m running a story with a piccie that’s not actually of the phone in the story. Well, it’s deceptively simple, according to Crackberry, because up until somebody confirmed that thing over there isn’t the Dakota, everyone thought it possibly might have been.
No, that is the Magnum prototype, apparently; the Dakota is said to be even better, so take everything I say about that phone in the pic, and times it by OVER 9,000, to get the Dakota.
Or something. Anyway, back to the point. While it may not be the Dakota, it shows where Blackberry are going to take their series of phones next; quite simply, they’re going to combine the keyboards of their earlier phones with exciting, whizzy new touchscreens. I have to say, I’m not entirely surprised. After all, they’ve gone from trackball to touchpad on most ranges, so going up to a full touchscreen is the next logical step. And looking at it from the other point of view, they always said they wanted their touchscreens, like on the Blackberry Storm 2, to work like one massive button, separating out the ‘scrolling’ part from the ‘clicking on’ part.
So mixing the old school with the new makes an awful lot of sense. And as for being advanced, there’s talk of the new phone including a camera with a liquid lens (where the lens itself changes shape to change focus, instead of moving the lens) which is totally new, and never-before-seen-on-any-other-phone.
So, yes. Advanced and rather sleek. That’s what the Dakota’s supposed to be. And given how sleek that Magnum prototype phone in the pic looks, I firmly predict the Dakota will blow our minds…
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