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RIM quiet on touchscreen BlackBerry rumours
"We're not religious on form factor," says co-CEO Balsillie

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Wednesday 14 May 2008

The new BlackBerry Bold may have been touted as an 'iPhone killer' despite its use of the familiar Qwerty keyboard but manufacturer RIM is refusing to be drawn on rumours that a touchscreen BlackBerry is in the offing.

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RIM is banking on the Qwerty keyboard to keep its users happy - despite Apple's success in creating truck-loads of chatter around its touchscreen iPhone. In fact, bypassing all the hype, RIM's latest device - the BlackBerry Bold - is as committed to the keyboard as ever, even if the smart phone has been styled to have an iPhone-esque silver silhouette.

Speaking at RIM's Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Florida, Alan T Panezic, VP of software product management at BlackBerry-maker RIM, said the Bold is all about "balance" as it has a high-resolution screen that gives the user more information on screen, without dispensing with the "comfort" of the Qwerty keyboard or compromising other key factors like battery life.

He said: "Primarily it [the BlackBerry] is a communications device… The feedback for us on keyboards has been fantastic, especially on the Bold. We've taken everything we've learned about keyboards in the last decade and whatever tweak, whatever trick we've learned, whatever optimisation - they are all in the keyboard on the Bold."

But RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie refused to be drawn on the touchscreen BlackBerry issue.

He told silicon.com: "We don't comment on products that haven't launched yet… We have evolved our products, so we're not religious on form factor; we're religious on efficiency and synchronisation and the carrier channel and then we evolve to the best of our ability given the circumstances that we're on. So who knows?"

Balsillie added: "While you're asking if there's going to be a touch device, why not ask if there's going to be a flip? Has there ever been a successful flip smart phone?"

The key variable when designing new BlackBerrys is efficiency, said Balsillie.

He said: "We focus principally on the efficiency because you have a multi-variant scarcity equation: battery is limited, thermodynamics is a challenge, capacity of the network is a challenge, size is a challenge - I have but one belt to give and I have to put [the device] up to my ear - and of course cost is a challenge, so unlike Moore's Law with one variant… for the same price we have five variants of scarcity so we focus on efficiency. So this is how we see our life when it comes to input and output and form factor - whether it's media player or speakers or camera or keyboard… or other derivates … we're not religious."