With the release of Apple’s iPhone, many started predicting demise Blackberry - one of the most popular mobile e-mail smartphones. But when you are typing e-mails, software keyboard on a touchscreen is not the best possible interface to accomplish the task. And Research in Motion has been pretty creative in a ways of combining convenient form factor and functionality of text entry. Just look at Blackberry Pearl.

So we wanted to see what RIMM is planing next for your Blackberry and decided to check U.S. Patent database for that. And we found a few interesting patent apps. One is from the beginning of January and is called “Mobile device with rotatable keyboard“:

As you can see this phone can be considered an evolution of Blackberry Pearl. The interesting innovation in it is a rotatable keyboard, and the text letters on the keys that are on a different axis to a numbers there.

So you can use this Blackberry in a normal phone mode and see the usual numeric keypad of the phone. But when you want to send SMS or and an e-mail you rotate the keyboard and start typing the text.

Another interesting thing that you can notice in the patent - it appears that RIMM is contemplating possibility of a flip -phone form factor for it’s Blackberry.

And we found another interesting patent called “Multiple keyword context sensitivity for application usage“. This application describes another line of thinking of how the Blackberry can evolve in the future:

This one is a little similar to the messaging phones that NOkia is currently selling. Still, an interesting idea and proof that all is well with the innovation at Research in Motion Labs, so we should see some very interesting Blackberry models in the near future.