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See that Storm -esque device there? You may have noticed that the home screen looks positively nothing like the experience you’re used to — and that’s because it’s not. Shown off as part of a slide deck in RIM’s “Super Apps” webinar for developers last week, the company’s official explanation is that this is a pure, off-the-cuff mockup, not indicative of anything they’re working on for future devices or releases of BlackBerry OS. To be fair, when you take the shot in context with the bullet points and the fact that this presentation was geared squarely at devs, we can imagine that they really were just using it to get folks’ creative juices flowing — but it makes…

We kid, we kid. There are many excellent reasons to choose a BlackBerry as your main handset in the year 2010, but we’ve got a brand new item to add to the list: bullet stoppage . A woman in Ohio was sitting with her gun-handling boyfriend at a restuarant when the gun went off and hit her leg. Lucky for the both of them, the BlackBerry in her pocket intercepted the bullet — rather sufficiently, though to the considerable demise of the handset. It seems as if it was helped along by a neoprene case of some sort, but it’s still pretty impressive for such a point blank attack. Love is a battlefield, folks. [Thanks, Tommy G.] BlackBerry stops bullet, at…

Let’s not mince words: any way you slice it, RIM’s built-in browser for BlackBerry renders sites about as well as your $199 netbook renders Avatar . The good news is that we’ve got every reason to believe the company recognizes the problem and is working to solve it — but on a completely unrelated front, they’re trying to speed up the process of fetching raw data off the interwebs, too. In a patent app made public this month, RIM’s lab geeks describe setting up a proxy server right on the phone that would intercept the browser’s web requests and bundle, compress, and send them to a gateway on the other end (BIS, we …

Mobile communication startup Nimbuzz has just made the first native application for BlackBerry smartphones that allows for multi-network chat sessions available in Research In Motion’s App World store (get it here ). The native functionality allows the free app to run in the background without interruption, have alert notifications ‘pushed’ to the BlackBerry device’s home screen and match notifications with the phone’s sound profiles. The program is first-generation, and Nimbuzz promises more features are forthcoming.

RIM has been busy outing updated BlackBerrys and the Pearl wasn’t forgotten. An updated version is apparently on its way and these early pics clearly show that the phone is shapping up nicely. Everything is there from the slender candy-bar form factor to the SureType keyboard. Everything but the pearly trackball though. That’s been replaced with a trackpad.

RIM’s successor to the original Bold — the BlackBerry Bold 9700 — has finally landed on our doorsteps. The 9000 is in many ways a hard act to follow. Hardware-wise, it lived up to its name, going where most phones never went with its retro, leathery, nearly clunky looks in an age of rounded edges and shiny curves. Don’t get us wrong — we loved the 9000’s aesthetics obsessively — which is why we couldn’t wait to get our hands on its newborn child. A few questions we had in mind: would the 9700 live up to its predecessor’s notoriously uncompromising fashion sense? Would the new Bold feel as good to hold and use in the hand as its loving parent ? How would it stack up against other, new devices from RIM? If these…

Our dear colleagues over at Engadget German have had a chance to play with RIM’s just-announced BlackBerry Bold 9700 today, and every indication we’ve gotten is that this thing is a perfect — if not extremely conservative — successor to the first-generation Bold . Interface and network speed are both praised (both the 9700 and the Bold before it feature a 624MHz core, so there’s some magic going on here) and the microSD card is now hot-swappable, meaning that you’ve got a theoretically limitless supply of storage space if you happen to be carrying around a pocketful of 16GB cards. Check out the full gallery below, and naturally, stay tuned for a…

Properly replacing one of the most popular, recognizable BlackBerrys ever made is no easy task for RIM, but it looks like they’ve done a respectable job in officially announcing the Bold 9700, a device we’ve seen rumored as the “Onyx” through much of 2009. The new model gently massages the original Bold’s time-tested formula by moving the camera up to 3.2 megapixels, giving the screen another 40 lines of vertical resolution (480 x 360, up from 480 x 320), and shipping with the brand new BlackBerry OS 5.0 out of the gate. Also notable is that the 9700 replaces the trackball with an optical trackpad –continuing a trend started by the Curve 8520 — and will ship in both 900 / 1700 / 2100 and 800 / 850 / 1900 / 2100MHz 3G varieties, making the phone a perfect fit for AT&T, …

We can’t confirm this Verizon Infomanager screen at this point, but if true, when the BlackBerry Storm 2 launches on the network, one of the big touted features will be its MiFi capabilities for sharing 3G internet over WiFi. It’d be smart branding move, sure, but MiFi is also the name Novatel uses for its hardware, so either we’re talking here about an application of some sort or it’s just internal communications short-hand. Also mentioned here is an October 21st launch, although it’s been noted by Crackberry that the date’s apparently been replaced with TBA. Without a doubt, we can confidently say we’ll know for sure in the next, oh, 52 hours or so. [Thanks, Marc-Anthony S.] Read - Intranet snapshot Read - Launch date pulled Filed under: …

The BlackBerry Storm 2 is the followup to Verizon’s most buzzed-about phone of last year, but Verizon didn’t help with the news. CrackBerry says the phone didn’t pass Verizon’s quality assurance. [ CrackBerry ]