BlackBerry taking a leaf out of HTC, Apple's book?

If you watch every patent a mobile maker files, you’d go half mad waiting for devices to actually turn up with all the half-crazed features that the patents promise. That said, this one from RIM looks promising – the patent includes a BlackBerry device with a slideout keyboard and a display that adapts to whether the user is looking at it in landscape or portrait mode.

The patent, filed in 2006 and recently unearthed by those people who look at patents, is a promising one – it would be great to see a device in a slightly different form factor from RIM and a slideout keyboard would seem like an obvious addition to the BlackBerry stable. After all, moving the keyboard would mean a bigger screen and that can only be good news for those who can’t spend a minute without reading their emails.

The idea of a display that can recognise the way the device is being held is reminiscent of what Apple’s doing with the iPhone at the moment. It’s a nice trick. Fingers crossed we don’t have to wait too much longer to see this handset on the shelves.