Since it’s a Friday afternoon, we’ll engage in some rumour mongering for once and point out these shots which are allegedly of RIM’s much anticipated BlackBerry OS 6.0.

Coming from BBLeaks.com (a site you’d think would try to focus on such things), they show a heavily redesigned home screen with widgets replacing the more common icon grid system. This would finally bring dynamic content to the BlackBerry homescreen while they also show RIM finally embracing more colour on its devices. OS 6.0 should also bring the first BlackBerry webkit-based browser.

True or false? There is talk these shots are simply reworkings of a slide RIM demoed last month showing a mock-up Apps Page (above right), but given the Swiss cheese security at the Canadian firm they could also prove right on the money. I’m calling them out as nonsense – or at best early prototypes (I’m not convinced any company would use grabs of their active news ticker with the ‘Haiti earthquake 2010′ update) – but time will tell…

In related BlackBerry news RIM has made Push notification functionality available to developers. Up to 8Kb of content can be pushed at any one time and while BlackBerrys can happily multi-task it does mean users can get notifications without having to swap from their current task. Both free (BlackBerry Push Essentials) and premium (BlackBerry Push Plus) services can be used, though we don’t yet know when the first Push apps will start appearing.

In yet more related BlackBerry news there is talk the much leaked touchscreen BlackBerry slider could launch as early as next month. If real (and signs are increasingly that it is) the Palm Pre-esque design would be a first for RIM and could finally woo hardcore BlackBerry users to a touchscreen design – something the Storm (and to a lesser extent Storm 2) failed at miserably…

Links:
via BlackBerry Leaks