Montreal - Photos and details that allegedly reveal a planned BlackBerry flip-phone aimed at everyday smartphone users helped send creator Research in Motion's (TSX:RIM) stock up more than five per cent on Thursday.
The big runup in RIM, already one of Canada's hottest stocks, came after a tech gadget blog called The Boy Genius Report reported the new phone will be out before the end of the year.
RIM shares were ahead $6.24 to $128.83 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
The Boy Genius blog said the new phone is code named "kickstart," has a thumb-operated SureType keyboard uses a trackball for navigation and comes equipped with a camera.
RIM did not comment immediately on the rumour.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based company has been moving the BlackBerry, already the biggest player in business smartphones, further into the consumer market, where it is taking on Apple's iPhone and smartphones by Nokia, Samsung and Motorola.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky called the Internet blog that leaked the news of the new BlackBerry phone "credible."
"It shows RIM is unafraid of reinventing itself to target competitive opportunities," Abramsky said in a research note.
"In our view, RIM is positioning itself for significantly larger market opportunities beyond its traditional base," he wrote.
Abramsky said the alleged new phone would be aimed at North American consumers and go head-to-head with mass market phone vendors such as stumbling Motorola.
"The clamshell BlackBerry is likely aimed at expanding Blackberry's addressable consumer market opportunity." Clamshells - slim, compact phones that open rather like the marine mollusks - are popular with North Americans, comprising an estimated 50 per cent of all phones sold.
Abramsky said the smartphone would maintain the hallmark BlackBerry push email and could possibly be a 3G, or next-generation, device and employ WiFi wireless technology.
But it would likely be introduced in the United States first.
Abramsky, who also said the launch date is expected this fall when other RIM products are introduced, said it will likely carried by Verizon, AT&T and Sprint in the United States.
He said it could be priced at US$149 or lower and with low-cost data plans ($20 to $30 per month) or as voice-only.
Analyst Nick Agostino said flip-phones are the device of choice for many consumers because they offer larger screens, ideal for Internet browsing.
But he sounded a note of caution about the phone and whether it would reach consumers' hands.
"One caution is that there's always lots of prototypes that make their way onto the Internet," said Agostino of Research Capital Corporation in Toronto.
"I don't question the photograph," he said. "It just remains to be seen whether it's something that they're (RIM) looking at, playing with, toying with, or are they actually going to bring it to market."
Agostino said the biggest change with the phone is the next generation SureType keyboard, on which each key shares two letters and which can anticipate the words a user intends to type.
New York-based ABI Research recently ranked Nokia as the worldwide leader in smartphones based on such criteria as handset size, support for third-party application developers, number of models, selling price and market share.
RIM and Samsung claimed the second and third spots in ABI's recent evaluation of worldwide smartphone vendors.
