Earlier this month RIM announced the BlackBerry Bold 9900, and 9930 but have still not released a launch date for them, and there are rumors that they may not be released until August. This is far too long a wait, and will put RIM in trouble if they take this long in order to come out.

RIM has not released anything at all since the 9780 over 6 months ago, and have not released anything of note since the Torch 9800 last August (already 9 months ago). Taking into consideration that the 9780 is hardly different then the 9700 (still lacking 802.11n even though other devices had it early in the year), that the 9670 was an odd device released on a single carrier, and never really had a chance, and that the 9300/9330 Curves were only a modest refresh to RIM’s budget brand, there has not been much new to look at in quite a while. As such it has been three-fourths of a year since any interesting BlackBerrys have been released, and RIM really needs to get going in order to catch up to the plethora of Android devices released in that time.

The situation on Verizon (still RIM’s largest carrier) is even worse. Half a year ago, I wrote that RIM needed to release a new touch screen device on Verizon, and that is even more true today. The last significant release of a BlackBerry on Verizon was the Bold 9650 which was more then a year ago (and even then at the time was considered to be a bit delayed). In terms of touchscreen devices the situation is even worse, as nothing has been released since the 9550 way back in October of 2009 (19 months ago).

RIM has some great devices lined up in the 9900/9930, 9810, and 9860, but that doesn’t matter unless they are actually offering them for sale. RIM needs to start shipping these devices sooner rather then later.