BlackBerry Springs Leaks, App World 2.0 Goes BetaBlackBerry Springs Leaks, App World 2.0 Goes Beta

By now you've heard that Research In Motion and AT&T have called for a press conference on Tuesday, August 3, in New York City. Neither company has spilled any details about the event, but we can make some educated guesses.

First, Research In Motion will probably make the official debut of BlackBerry 6, its newest operating system. RIM has been parceling out bits and pieces of information about the new OS on its own blog ever since the April preview of BlackBerry 6. RIM will hopefully share information about when the OS will become available and all the nitty gritty details and features contained therein.

Second, RIM is likely to introduce the long-rumored BlackBerry 9800. According to scattered reports, the BlackBerry 9800 will be a slider running BlackBerry 6 and it is headed to AT&T. It will support AT&T's 3G bands and also includes 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.

It will have an HVGA touch display, though we don't know how large it will be. Other features mentioned include a memory card slot, camera with video capture, voice dialing, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of internal storage. Not bad. Spy shots of the 9800 show a fairly small-ish device with a decent screen that slides up to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard.

A video posted to the Internet purports to show off the BlackBerry 9780 running BlackBerry 6. The video provides a nice overview of what we can expect to see during RIM's press conference next week. It also provides a few hints about the unannounced 9780, too.

Beyond all that, Research In Motion has also started pushing out BlackBerry App World 2.0 to beta testers. If you recall, RIM announced App World 2.0 several months ago. The new version of the Web stores brings a number of welcome changes, such as carrier billing, better searching, and better management tools for end users.

The new version of the app store isn't being pushed to everyone yet, but we'll probably learn more from RIM on August 3. Since it is in beta, a full roll-out shouldn't be too far off.