iPhone To Take on BlackBerry with Slide-out Keyboard?

You may find this hard to believe, but there’s actually some iPhone buzz out there that doesn’t involve anything happening on July 11.

Citing “insider Apple sources,” Pocket-lint says that Apple is reportedly working on a new style of iPhone, one that has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It’s even supposed to have shipped some prototypes of the new gizmo out to execs at a few operators.

Apple has taken some flack lately from folks complaining that the iPhone’s touch-screen display isn’t friendly to women with long fingernails or anyone with large or fat fingers. Of course, the QWERTY keyboards on mobile devices don’t necessarily work well for those groups of users either.

The real reason for the possible addition of a keyboard would likely be to make the iPhone more enterprise-friendly. Or, in other words, to wage a full-on battle against the BlackBerry for the business user.

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