The Porsche Black berry

The Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9981 has a fully QWERTY keyboard etched onto a forged stainless steel front and a leather back.

Powered by the BlackBerry 7 operating system, the P'9981 has a 1.2GHz processor, 8GB of storage, a camera that can record 720p HD video and an NFC chip for contactless payments. It will be released before the end of 2011, according to technology magazine T3.


It won't be cheap, however. Smartphone buyers who complain about the price of Apple's iPhone will baulk at the eye-watering £1,275 price tag for the P'9981. Still, they are unlikely to be the target market: this is a handset to compete with Vertu's luxury smartphones.

It has been a difficult year for RIM, the company that makes BlackBerry devices. The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer flopped, the company's brand was linked to the August riots in Britain, as youths organised themselves on BlackBerry Messenger, and in October the entire network went down across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

RIM's share price has fallen accordingly and pressure is growing on the company's joint CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, to turn things around. Earlier this month it was reported that Amazon had considered buying the company but was rebuffed because RIM wanted to solve its problems on its own.
Source: Telegraph