Research In Motion (RIMM) is doing everything it can to stay the course as it prepares to launch its debut BlackBerry 10 smartphone early next year. The struggling vendor has precious little in the way of fresh handsets to keep it afloat in the meantime — a recent report claimed some carrier stores haven’t sold a single BlackBerry smartphone in more than a month — but RIM’s executive team seems confident that its next-generation smartphones will mark the beginning of a new chapter for RIM.

New images of company’s first BlackBerry 10 smartphone, code-named BlackBerry London, were published on Tuesday by Blackberryitalia.it and while we’re not seeing anything special in terms of a differentiated design, it does appear that RIM has built a solid piece of hardware on which it will debut its new platform.

The London is rumored to feature a full touchscreen form factor with a 768 × 1280-pixel high-definition display, and the handset is currently slated to launch early in the first quarter of 2013.

[Via Crackberry]

Read