On Research in Motion’s Q3 Fiscal 2012 earnings call, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis announced that BlackBerry 10 smartphones would be delayed until late 2012 because the company is waiting on new dual-core, dual-mode, LTE chipsets that won’t become available until mid 2012.

Yesterday, however, BGR released an exclusive report citing a high-ranking RIM employee claiming that BlackBerry 10 devices aren’t delayed because RIM is waiting on a new chipset, but, because BlackBerry 10 devices don’t work.

Research in Motion responded in an official statement stating that the anonymous claims are inaccurate and uninformed reiterating that the delay is due to chipset availability and any suggestion to the contrary is simply false.

Honestly, does it really matter why BlackBerry 10 is delayed?

The sad state for Research in Motion is that they company had to immediately respond to the BGR report because it, even if improbable, sounds awfully plausible.  The fact of the matter is that Research in Motion won’t offer a smartphone on par with the iPhone 3G or Android 2.0 until late next year.

Consumers won’t care if the delay is because RIM is waiting for processors to power their phones that don’t yet exist or if the prototypes RIM are working on don’t actually work.  What they do care about is being able to get a phone that doesn’t seem inferior to the one next to it on the display shelf, and, sadly, this will be the case for RIM until at least late next year.