RIM’s leaking like the proverbial sieve, and The Boy Genius is standing underneath lapping at the fact juices.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that an internal source has just furnished them with some new hands-on impressions of the BlackBerry 9000.  After confirming the specs of the smartphone - a 624MHz processor, 480×320 screen, GPS, WiFi and 3G - and the OS version (4.5), the tipster lavished some praise on the 9000’s browser claiming it ”loads web pages in 3-4 seconds”.  However, a dark cloud hangs over the BlackBerry in its current pre-production form: frankly dire battery life.

According to their source, even with normal calling the battery lasts a mere four hours; go online and expect to see that more than halved: “Battery sucks, to be honest. With WiFi on, I only got a little less than two hours browsing the web”.  Apparently all testers of the handset are reporting serious issues with the 9000’s ability to guzzle through a charge - hence the delay from the initial expected AT&T launch on June 18th.

The 9000 also has either 256MB or 128MB of internal memory, and it sounds like the firmware is going to go through some major tweaking to staunch that power leak.