Rodman Renshaw, analyst Ashok Kumar, has been monitoring BlackBerry maker-RIM and its manufacturing partners. He reported that RIM considered making a tablet with the Android OS but instead is making its own OS, revealed at is conference
The BlackBerry Tablet BlackPad aka Cobalt will be out to early next year, says Kumar.
RIM is designing its tablet for the consumer market --not its usual business users. Kumar reports that RIM has enlisted Quanta in Taiwan's hu to build the device.
The "BlackPad" is also slated to use Marvell's
Armada processor. Rumors also circulated that RIM was buying touchscreens for a project.
Asian component suppliers were ask to collec 8.9-inch displays and deliver them in time for December 2010.
The big BlackBerry tablet is supposedly smaller and thinner than the iPad and will be released at WES next year.
Over 1 million iPads have been sold. The next BlackBerry will be the BlackBerry Bold 9650 will be released in the U.S. some time soon.
The BlackBerry Bold 9650 has a QWERTY keyboard, 512 Flash memory
which is double previous model, microSDHC (expandable to 32 Gb, 2
gigabytes included) 3.2 Megapixel camera, 3.5 mm audio jack, 480 x 360
245ppi display, Bluetooth, GPS, voice dialing, and speaker phone. The
model has a keyboard similar to the BlackBerry Tour 9630 with the
trackball replaced by a trackpad.