While this is all still speculation at the moment, the impact of this possibility has some real consequences in the legions of Blackberry users – RIM may be entering the slate device market by the end of the year.

RIM to Enter the Slate Device Market - "Slateberry" Tablet by End of Year - Mobile 2


According to the report at The Register (sourced: BetaNews), it is speculated that the Blackberry slate will be a 7″ device, use a Marvell Armada 610 1GHz CPU which is capable of HD decoding, and presumably Flash 10.1 and Blackberry OS 6.

Apparently, the device is being pushed up from the early 2011 release to late 2010 to compete in the lucrative, yet crowded holiday buying season. If there is any weight to these remarks, you can expect to see more news of this in the coming days and weeks.

PS. I have dubbed this new RIM device the “Slateberry”. If this term catches, you heard it here first… and I want royalties! 🙂