First leaked photo of BlackBerry Storm 3 shows a bigger screen

The BlackBerry Storm and its sequel didn't do so hot when RIM was trying to break into the touch phone market. But as they say, third time's the charm - the first BlackBerry Storm 3 photos hit the interwebs and they look like an improvement.

The BlackBerry Storm 3 reportedly has a bigger screen than its predecessors - 3.7" unit looks much roomier than the 3.25" screens on the Storm and Storm 2. There's no info on the resolution though, hopefully it's got a bump from the 360x480 pixels resolution of the previous versions.

First photo of the BlackBerry Storm 3 • The BlackBerry Torch 9800 in red

The Storm 3 also features Wi-Fi hotspot connectivity, says the rumor-mill, and 8GB of built-in memory. There's an optical trackpad this time around.

A leaked slide from July allegedly had info on the Storm 3 - BlackBerry OS 6 (and the WebKit browser it brings), 512MB RAM and support for microSD cards up to 32GB. The camera is listed as 5MP and there's Wi-Fi 802.11n support. SurePress is back too, even though it was dropped for the BlackBerry Torch 9800.

So far so good - but here's where things start getting iffy. Check out the slide - there doesn't seem to be a trackpad. And there's that gossip that the Storm2 we'll be actually getting an almost silent refresh (the one on the slide) so it stays as a current model, while the real BlackBerry Storm 3 is the device pictured in hand above. So for now, take everything with a big pinch of salt.

Since we mentioned the Torch, check out the second photo - it looks great in red.

Source: Berry Review, Boy Genius Report