Research In Motion's BlackBerry 6 Coming In Third Quarter 2010

Today is a big day for Research In Motion. After officially announcing two new devices, they've gone ahead and revealed that their next major Operating System upgrade is coming soon. Perhaps not as soon as we'd like, but beggar's can't be choosers. After seeing the leaked images almost a week ago today, we were eagerly anticipating the announcement from Waterloo.

RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis managed to take some time out of his busy schedule today to talk to analysts, and go over some key information. While he had some brief nuggets of joy to talk about regarding BlackBerry's AppWorld, the real gem of the showcase regarded BlackBerry 6. That's what the company is calling their next OS iteration, and we like the sound of it. As the title suggests, BlackBerry 6 will be hitting the third calender quarter of this year, and it's going to be optimized for both touchscreen and non-touchscreen devices.

Additionally, that WebKit browser we saw in the leaked OS 6.0 images seems to be far more integrated into the new system than originally believed. According to Lazaridis, it's going to be found also throughout the device's software platform, along with the applications that run on it. Basically, that means we shouldn't expect it to get launched with any currently running OS 5.x devices. And, while RIM does their best to upgrade previous handsets to their newest OS (and they plan to do that with every currently available device they can to BlackBerry 6), it doesn't look too good for all devices out there. So, we imagine that if you've bought a newer-released handset, you might be okay.

As BlackBerry's biggest show of the year continues to kick off, we'll be keeping the tabs on what's going on, and all the noteworthy bits that leak out. So, stay tuned if you're a BlackBerry fan. The company still has a big keynote tomorrow as well.