World Center Marriott, ORLANDO, USA - At the WES 2010, Research In Motion Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis provided a sneak peek of BlackBerry 6, as well as the new BlackBerry user interface that will debut next quarter.

The operating system upgrade may be a bit bold for what is really happening with this release. It is not a core redesign of the OS for BlackBerry devices. It is a fresh new overlay to the OS that provides a lot of the functionality that users have been clamoring for since the introduction of the iPhone.

Inevitably, the comparison to the iPhone OS has to take place, it has become the de facto standard for mobile devices. The iPhone has over 100,000 apps (usefulness can be argued), because the device is easy to write programs for. The BlackBerry OS is a bit of a challenge, and RIM needs to have a hard look at the OS and the processor, beefing up the computing power, and start to draw in the developers. RIM’s recent acquisition of QNX, a Linux kernel design company, may be the start of this effort. Imagine the power of a BlackBerry combined with a library of apps like those that are available for Google Android and the iPhone.

The new BlackBerry 6 UI will have crisp more immersive visuals, new graphics, animations and transitions; a new WebKit browser that includes tabbed browsing; multi-touch support, pinch-to-zoom while browsing, viewing photos; redesigned core applications, plus a new media player UI, a new home screen experience; multiple views based on content type, universal search, and pages. There will also be a new app for integrating RSS and social network feeds.

The devices that will work with the new UI may be limited to those with at least 256MB of memory.