BlackBerry 9760 Flip Phone Coming to Verizon & Vodafone Only?

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Well if it isn’t the ugly duckling that just managed to catch our attention again! Say what you will about the clamshell BlackBerry 9670 but I bet that “nice”, “beautiful” or “pretty” are not going to be the words to describe it.

The BlackBerry 9670 has been leaked right before WES 2010 and we all expected RIM to announce it this week. But RIM didn’t say anything about the phone and we’re only left with unconfirmed rumors about it. The new flip phone will bring us a strange clamshell design, a 5-megapixel camera, two displays: one large external screen and an even larger 360 x 480 internal touchscreen, full QWERTY keyboard, optical trackpad, Wi-Fi, CDMA support and BlackBerry 6.

It is now rumored that the 9670 has been made specifically at the request of Verizon and that this BlackBerry is going to be sold through Verizon and Vodafone channels only. But will anyone buy it? Verizon apparently ordered a flip smartphone that would also offer a new interface and a 5-megapixel camera. Should these rumors turn out to be true then I’d say Verizon didn’t really use that well its imagination and creativity on this one. From what I’ve seen so far not that many people are truly enthusiastic about this new design.

Looking back at WES 2010, I’ll have to say that it was rather disappointing. RIM has not announced any new phones. Well sure, the BlackBerry Bold 9650 has been made official but that’s just an updated Tour version. RIM also presented the Pearl 3G which, at the end of the day, is just another Pearl handset. Where’s the BlackBerry Storm3 slider and where are all the other handsets supposed to arrive this year?

The only great thing we’ve seen at WES is BlackBerry 6, a totally new OS for RIM’s smartphones, even if it looks very much like Apple’s iPhone OS. But it’s not all good news since the OS clearly suggests that RIM’s future is going to a lot more touch-friendly than we imagined.

Getting back to the BlackBerry 9670 which will probably come with BlackBerry 6 on board, we have no news of its actual arrival yet. And neither Verizon nor Vodafone are willing to say anything at this time.