Blackberry Thunder first touchscreen for RIM: Bold gets physical keyboard

First we started hearing lots of news about the Blackberry Bold and now it’s the Blackberry Thunder that has stole the Bold’s “Thunder” (sorry, but had to be said)”. It was only two days ago that we reported about the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 smartphone being made official, its physical keyboard and how it compared to the and HTC Touch Diamond and rumored features of June’s Apple 3G iPhone. AT&T may have been the first to get the new Blackberry Bold, but its Verizon in the US and Vodafone in Europe who are said to get a lifetime exclusive to the Blackberry Thunder.

This is the first Blackberry smartphone to include a touchscreen display and currently there are no photos of the official phone, but we will post them as soon as they are made available. The BlackBerry Bold looks impressive, but you cannot help thinking that its physical keyboard is a feature of old school smartphones and what it should have had was a touchscreen. The Blackberry Thunder will fill this role, although this name and model of BlackBerry 9500 could change nearer towards its release (Q3 2008), thats about it on features, not much else is known other than it will include only 4 physical keys (back key, the BlackBerry menu key, send / end phone keys). The cell phone will run on 3G EV-DO Rev. C and for international use it will use GSM HSPA.

Do you prefer touchscreen controls on your phones or a physical QWERTY keyboard?

Source: Read