Tired of all the iPhone news? The good folks over at CrackBerry have gotten their hands on the first live pictures of the Thunder. Yes it looks pretty damn sexy.

The photo above shows off the often discussed “tactile” keyboard. Just hold the phone in landscape mode and you can use a full-qwerty keypad. Portrait mode will let you enter data on a SureType keyboard. You can change the orientation at anytime.

This might make you stop and think if you’re after a 3G iPhone. Here’s a live shot of the upcoming BlackBerry Thunder, sporting a touchscreen. Not a ton of info from the image, but it sure has a ton of buttons, some of which include send, end, back, menu, dual convenience keys, volume, lock, etc. It’s coming to Verizon and they should do quite well. The war to decide who gets your money is on.

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.

Apple sent out invitations to reports this week for press announcement concerning the details of the iPhone SDK. Jobs said it would happen in February and the date is set for next week on March 6 which we’ll call close enough. The expected information will allow developers to create third party applications that will run on the iPhone and the iPod touch, ridding the need for the hack and fix battle that Apple has been dealing with this past year.

The new Facebook application from RIM will send out a ping with new notifications and messages and also allow you to scroll through them just like you do in regular email. Plus, the photo upload tool is integrated into the camera and photo software.

You can pretty much do almost anything you can on Facebook, thanks to the onscreen icons. With a touch of your finger, you will be able to invite people to join Facebook and accept new friend requests. Just like that it’s done. No adding them later after you’ve gotten home and forgotten everything. Of course you can also poke someone and write on a Wall.

Verizon went ahead and unleashed four new phones all at once targeted at the fall shopping season trying to get a share of AT&T’s iPhone dollars. The new lineup includes the Voyager and Venus from LG along with the narrow Samsung Juke and the Blackberry Pearl sporting EV-DO.

The headliner of this Verizon release party is the LG Voyager looking very similar to the iPhone from the outside with a large touchscreen on the face. Once you get your hands on the Voyager you’ll see that it’s a little bulkier than the iPhone and that touchscreen face actually hinges open to expose another display inside that faces a large QWERTY keyboard, hence the thickness. The Voyager also has V CAST Mobile TV, a microSD slot and a modest 2 megapixel camera.

Samsung and T-Mobile today announced the release of the Samsung Blast slider-style mobile phone. The Blast focuses on keeping in touch with your friends through multiple communication features aside from just talk.

The crimson and black slider phone exposes a QWERTY like keypad similar to the Blackberry Pearl to allow faster and easier text entry. Users will want to use this advanced keypad to take advantage of the email service provided through the Samsung Blast with access to email through AOL, Yahoo Mail and Gmail as well as MAP4, POP3 and …

Everybody is gaga over the iPhone. It’s sexy, it’s sleek, and it’s definitely all Apple design all the way. Steve Jobs wowed us with his presentation of the iPhone. However, that could have just been the effect of the famous Jobs Reality Distortion Field. The question on our minds is: Is the iPhone a contender in the cut throat mobile phone arena? We look at a few issues that may hinder the fledgling iPhone on its first flight out of the Apple Aerie.

Price

At $500 …