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RIM is right to prioritize touch-screen models for growth, though it can’t yet afford to drop keyboard-equipped handsets altogether, said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics in Dedham, Massachusetts.

“You can’t build a smartphone without a touch screen anymore,” he said by telephone. “But you can’t expect your loyal user base to stick with you if you take away why they’ve stuck with you.”

Fruit Resemblance

The BlackBerry’s name derives from the idea that the tiny, black keys on the device resemble the fruit. Users furiously pecking away at the keyboards fueled the image of the “CrackBerry” addict in the years before smartphones began usurping RIM’s market share.

RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, began handing out test models of the new BlackBerry 10 smartphones to developers last May. Though RIM stressed then that the prototype would differ from the final product, the glass slab was designed to give developers a tool to approximate the surface of the BlackBerry 10 touch-screen model.

Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben said in an interview earlier this month that there are now more than 70,000 apps available for BlackBerry 10, a sufficient number to make RIM competitive with more widely adopted platforms offered by Apple and Google Inc., whose Android system is used by Samsung.

Separate software developer kits, known as SDKs, will be distributed with the Dev Alpha C devices to help programmers tailor their apps to the smaller screen and different button controls on the keyboard models, RIM’s Berry said. As with the touch-screen versions, these prototypes will look different from the products that go on sale, she said.