A new patent application showed up recently on the USPTO website from Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry mobile devices. The application shows a slider phone with a hidden QWERTY keyboard behind and looks an awful lot like some mobile handsets we’ve seen recently from HTC.

The device is described by RIM as a Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard. I don’t think we’ve seen any devices from HTC that have a trackball which is somewhat of a trademark of RIM, but is that enough to make this a novel invention? We’re also wondering if this could be the new touchscreen BlackBerry that we’ve been hearing rumors about for quite some time now.

USPTO via CellPhoneBeat via BlackBerryCool