Latest snippet from the BlackBerry 9000 rumor factory is that the upcoming HSDPA smartphone will have a front-mounted camera for video calls.  The news is courtesy of Luis Rodriguez, who appears to have had access to a pre-production version of the handset.  He’s also claiming it has an externally-accessible microSD slot, is broader and longer (though thinner) than the BlackBerry Curve, and has a larger battery.

That final point will come as no surprise; it’s already been suggested that the 9000 is something of a power-hog.  Last month an internal source at RIM disclosed that the pre-production 9000 devices they’d been using had battery life that “sucks”.  In their own words, “With WiFi on, I only got a little less than two hours browsing the web.”

Since 3G is associated with video calling, the presence of a front-mounted camera to facilitate that isn’t much of a surprise.  It’ll be interesting to see whether people take to it any more than they have on other devices, where it has failed to be the “must have” feature that carriers believed it would be. 

[via Digg]