RIM slaps new phone and $150 mil on the table

CANADIAN SMARTPHONE pioneer Research In Motion (RIM) has released a new Canuckberry / Crackberry / Blackberry which, suprprise, surprise, bears a passing resemblance to our old friend the Iphone.

Complete with curvey corners and a gleaming chrome frame, the bafflingy-named Bold (does it get yer whites right too?) is a high-end device aimed squarely at business users.

Boasting a screen resolution twice has high as the last Curve model (though still trailing behind Apple's offering on the size front) it also sports top-of-the-line WiFi wifflery, the now traditional little love button track ball and a teeny weeny QWERTY keyboard with one character per key (fat-fingered oafs need not apply).

The front, the sides and the backberry

The Bold, or the Blackberry 9000 as we'll be calling it for the sake of avoidance of sudsy confusion, should be available from a number of UK providers later this summer.

In another Apple-shadowing move RIM has trumped the Cupertino Collective's $100 million developer fund with a little trick of its own.

The Blackberry Partners Fund has offered a pot of $150 million as venture capital for companies developing software for mobile platforms. And it doesn't have to be on a Blackberry! How odd. µ