BlackBerry is at it again with some more great news for their mobile device consumers like BlackBerry Bold 9700.  RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis recently announced that the company’s next platform, which is being called BlackBerry 6, will be available “in the next calendar quarter,” which can be assumed as the third quarter of 2010.  While there was no video preview of the platform at BlackBerry’s most recent event the demo they did have showed a touchscreen interface and with the assistance of a follow up question from the audience it was confirmed BlackBerry 6 will be available for both touch and non-touch devices.

Lazaridis also mentioned that the company’s all-new WebKit-based browser is part and parcel with BlackBerry 6 pointing out that the rendering engine will have implications throughout the platform and the apps that run on it not just the browser alone.  In other words you should not be expecting a release of WebKit browser for OS 5 based devices.

While it is RIM’s intention to for every device in the RIM portfolio to eventually run BlackBerry 6 not every device on the market today will be upgradeable.  Lazaridis says they will do their best but he is not making any guarantees, so check and see if it will be available for your BlackBerry Curve.

With the recent improvements made by RIM and their OS 5.0 release I am very eager to see what features BlackBerry 6 is set to include.  OS 5 was a major upgrade to the earlier operating systems BlackBerry was employing so it will be very exciting to see what BlackBerry 6 will look like.  The idea of having a touchscreen on my BlackBerry is very thrilling to say the least.  It sounds like BlackBerry is really making some strides to catch up with other smartphones on the market today.