Update:  WebKit BlackBerry Browser demonstrated at MWC 2010.  It looks pretty slick…

You may have heard that Research in Motion has been working on a new Webkit based BlackBerry Browser that they say will be on par with that found on the iPhone by the summer of this year.  To let the world know that they were serious, RIM purchased Torch Mobile, makers of the Webkit IRIS browser back in August of last year.  Just the other day RIM filed a patent application describing a proxy based web browsing scheme similar to that found in Opera Mini, and recenytly,  analysts over at Canaccord Adams have gone on the record stating they believe the new BlackBerry Browser will be out before May and that the experience will be a “game changer“.

“it is a full rendering engine with incredible speed, sub three second download speeds for the most media-intensive of websites, while retaining significant bandwidth advantages over any other device or browser on the market.”

For the sake of argument, let’s say that the new BlackBerry Browser actually turns out to be better than Safari on the iPhone.  Is that enough to change the game?  I am not so sure that a really good, or even a great BlackBerry Browser is enough to change the game alone.

Hopefully RIM is spending as much time addressing  the way that applications use memory on the BlackBerry and the ease of which those applications can be developed.  I will, however, leave this for another post.