BlackBerry Niagara 9630 Phone

Guess the BlackBerry Niagara, also know by its model number 9630, ain't that shy after all - it has finally surfaced while allowing folks to snap some photos of it in the process. This sweet CDMA BlackBerry comes with a full QWERTY keyboard just like other brethren in the stable, and looks as though it is the love child of the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and BlackBerry Bold. Well, are you excited about the pending release of the Niagara, or do you think we have more than enough phones in the market right now, and hope that this deluge of releases will stop for a few months so that consumers can digest what's are the options available before being flooded with the release of yet another new model

Hail the guys at Crackberry because they have scored the first live picture of Blackberry Niagara 9630. A crossover of Curve 8900 and Bold 9000, the Niagara 9630 is a CDMA and quadband GSM based world edition phone packing GPS, possibly 3G but no Wi-Fi.

Whether this are real photos of the Blackberry Niagara, also known now as the Blackberry 9630 remains to be seen. But since Crackberry.com sourced them, I’m inclined to believe they are real. As you can see, Research In Motion opted to forgo the full touchscreen funny business of the Blackberry Storm and stick with the tried-and-true trackball and QWERTY keypad.

In other Blackberry news, the pricing structure for the Blackberry App World has been posted on the RIM site, and unlike Apple’s minimum $0.99 price tag for paid applications, the App World opts for a $2.99 price point. I know there has been quite a bit of chatter on the web today about how that may be a bad thing. It’s true in a way if RIM is looking for pure download numbers. Some of the stupidest applications you could possibly think of have been incredibly successful in the iPhone App Store priced at $0.99.

But remember, Blackberry smartphones have gained global success by catering to enterprise users. When the Storm launched with an iPhone-like touchscreen, a plethora of Blackberry fanatics were turned off. The best thing for the Blackberry, in my opinion, is for Research In Motion to think ‘enterprise’ at all times. By pricing Blackberry apps at a higher price minimum, it’s likely developers won’t submit crap apps. Take into consideration the $200 developers have to fork out just to submit an application and it makes even more sense. That has to be made back somehow.

Sure, the pic's getting old at this point, but according to the Boy Genius Report, we may not have too much longer to wait to catch the 9630 Niagara in the wild. The radio department in the 9630 is filled to busting -- or slowly warming your face -- with CDMA, EV-DO Rev.A, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, and UMTS, with the GSM flavors getting the quad-band treatment. The rumored OS at launch is 4.7.1, though if delayed enough, it could pull through with OS 5.0. The last tidbits in the list are a 3.2 megapixel shooter -- and maybe a version without -- and the depressing news of no specific release date. Though, If we were Verizon and were sitting on this, you'd like to think that our timeline to launch would be as soon as frickin' possible.