RIM’s BlackBerry Bold 9790 seems like it’s been hanging around forever. We got our first look at the smartphone all the way back in May, but it’s been creeping back into our lives in recent weeks as its release date apparently nears. Imagine our surprise, then, when a phone we’ve been used to seeing for so long shows up in a new pic with signs of a hardware revision this late in the game.

Ignoring the extreme-blurrycam effects, it’s still easy to make out the change in this supposed 9790 picture, with RIM swapping the flat button panel that we’ve seen on every pic of the model thus far with individual, separate buttons. The phone’s aesthetics might take a slight hit but ultimately whether or not this change is an improvement or not is going to depend on your personal feelings towards the flush-mount capacitive-look. If you can’t live without it, the slightly-larger Bold 9900/9930 is always an option.

Supposedly, this new-button-packing 9790 will show up in stores in about a month. The tipster who shared this pic with BGR also had some news of the next BBOS update in the works, revealing that there are plans to get 7.1 released before 2011′s out; after that, BBX is the word.

Source: BGR