RIM ditches clicky touchscreen from next-gen BlackBerry Storm II

Pre-release models of the next-gen BlackBerry Storm and Curve smartphones have scuttled out of RIM’s Canada HQ and they show the company is listening to customers and critics alike.

First up is the Storm II, aka ‘Odin’, which loses the click-screen of the original Storm and returns to a more conventional capacitive touchscreen panel as used by the iPhone et al.

The move is a major backdown for RIM which invested plenty of time, money and resources into creating its patented ‘SurePress’ technology to enable the touchscreen to feel and work a little more like a traditional keypad. Although undeniably innovative it didn’t find favour with users.

It’s believed that haptic feedback will be employed to help simulate typing. In addition the four physical keys along the bottom of the Storm have been replaced with virtual soft-keys on the display, making the Storm II slightly smaller and more pocket-friendly than its predecessor.

Also in the works at Waterloo is the BlackBerry Onyx, which has surfaced to get the full hands-on preview treatment at CrackBerry.com.

CrackBerry’s Kevin Michaluk describes the Onyx as “the pinnacle of the traditional BlackBerry”. The Onyx takes the compact shape of the Curve 8900 (LINK) with its 3.2 megapixel camera and sharp 480 x 360 display, but adds the 3G radio and larger 1550 mAh battery of the BlackBerry Bold 9000 along with GPS and Wi-Fi. The keyboard seems to borrow a little from both the Curve 8990 and Bold 9000.

“It’s like RIM simply grabbed the best DNA from each device and tossed it together to make a super baby, which in this case is not a bad thing” Michaluk observes.

Michaluk also speculates that the Onyx runs the triple-core ‘Tavor’ ARM processor of the Bold rather than the single-core ‘Hermione’ engine of the Curve and Pearl.

Tavor allows for each core to be dedicated to a specific task – one for running applications, another for handling a phone call and the third for managing the digital signal processing during that call – and can shut down unused cores to save battery life.