While RIM has confirmed that it does have plans to manufacture BlackBerry 10 devices with physical keyboards, it doesn't look like the company's first BB10 product will be one of them. A RIM spokesperson today said that the first BlackBerry 10 device will have only a software keyboard. The spokesperson then reiterated that RIM does indeed have plans for phones with physical 'boards, but the only time frame given for such a product's arrival was a vague "in the future."
RIM showed off its BlackBerry 10 software keyboard back at BlackBerry World in May. One of the feature's of the BB10 keyboard is its predictive text, which will show words that the software thinks that the user will want to input next and float them above the first letter in that word. If the user does indeed want to put one of those words into the message, they can swipe up on the first letter to insert the word. It'll be interesting to give the BlackBerry 10 software keyboard a spin for ourselves to see how well the predictive feature works and if it can help speed up the process of pounding out a message. RIM has said that it plans to launch BlackBerry 10 this year, but it has yet to narrow that timeframe any further.
