NEW BLACKBERRY HANDSETS have appeared on a popular UK mobile phone retail site, all without even being announced yet by its maker Research In Motion.

Pocket-Lint has picked up these have shown up for pre-ordering, with Expansys.com getting way ahead of themselves as they’ve not been officially confirmed. As far as RIM is concerned, these haven’t even been established as actual handsets, yet alone the model numbers shown or even product names.

This is despite the whole world knowing them by now as KickStart or 8220 and 8210, due to multiple sightings in the wild. You just can’t keep a good secret down.

Within a short time of the media picking up on this, the BBBFS (BlackBerry Brute Force Squad) moved in and had the product page taken down. All of which is a damn shame, as there’s no real way to corroborate this story, or is there.

Thanks to the wondrous marvel that is the Google internet cache, we can still show The INQ readers this premature act, seen here.

These new quad-band handsets are of a clamshell design in nature, another breakaway from their previous corporate formulaic models. This has proved to be in the past a nice little earner for them in the business world, but not so much though in the consumer market.

The first of the breakaways came in their candy-bar form factor Pearl series, which went on to be a big seller and grabbed some well deserved consumer attention.

Also rumoured to be on the horizon, is its upcoming Iphone-esque handset codenamed Thunder, a full touch-screen mobile that is hoped to give the company who-shall-not-be-named a run for its money.

Perhaps we’ll see this one leaked too. µ

L’INQ

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