People familiar with the QWERTY BlackBerry line from Research in Motion will be familiar with the trackball or trackpad from the Bold, Tour, Curve, or Pearl lines. However, in a bold move, RIM may be moving away from the hardware optical trackpad or trackball in favor of going with a hardware QWERTY with a touchscreen. RIM had previously had a rumored design called the BlackBerry Magnum, which meshes a BlackBerry Bold form factor with a touchscreen, similar to the Windows Mobile HP iPAQ Glisten. However, in the latest round of rumored, the Magnum reference design got canned for the BlackBerry Dakota design, which essentially may be a Magnum without the trackpad.

The BlackBerry Dakota will also use some new camera technology for mobile phones. It seems that RIM researchers are going to using liquid lens technology, which uses fluids to create a variable lens and contains no moving parts as the camera will use the surface curvature of the liquid. You can read more about liquid lens technology that RIM may be pushing in this article.

(via: CrackBerry and Engadget)