BlackBerry Milan First Photo Emerges – Elegant Slider with BlackBerry 10 OS

Shortly after BlackBerry London’s first photo made headlines last month, a new BBX (BlackBerry 10) smartphone emerged, which clearly shows that RIM is not yet ready to get rid of the thing that made it so popular among mobile phone users, the traditional QWERTY keyboard.

The folks over at CrackBerry published the first image of BlackBerry Milan, one of the BlackBerry 10 smartphones that appeared in RIM’s roadmap for the 2012.

Although details on the phone’s specs sheet are slim to say the least, from what we can see in the picture there’s no doubt that Research In Motion will keep the QWERTY keyboard, but it will add its phones some of the functionality offered by large touchscreen display.

Sources close to the matter told CrackBerry that all the upcoming BlackBerry 10 smartphones that will be announced next year will be packed with stunning displays with “higher pixel density than iPhone 4’s retina screen.”

RIM has enough time to tweak its next generation QNX-based devices, but from what we noticed the BlackBerry Milan is built with the PlayBook in mind, which means there are no physical or touch-sensitive buttons other than the standard QWERTY keyboard.

There’s no optical trackpad either which probably means that the whole control is based on bezel gestures.

Design-wise, the BlackBerry Milan is stylish and elegant. The upper part features rounded corners, while the bottom lower part features sharper edges, which strongly resemble the BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9981.

The capacitive touchscreen will probably have at least 4-inch and, hopefully, it will boast HD resolution.

Obviously, there’s no word on the phone’s release date, but it may be introduced alongside the other QNX-based device that leaked last month, the BlackBerry London.

In fact, there’s a high chance that RIM will announce some of its upcoming BlackBerry 10 devices sometime in Q1 2012, probably at CES 2012 or MWC 2012. Stay tuned for more updates on the subject.