The much-anticipated release of Blackberry 10 will allegedly incorporate new camera features that look suspiciously like what Android and iOS users can do in a little ol' app called Instagram.
According to a report posted over at Crackberry, RIM is allegedly building new, "filters, frames, transformations, and photo enhancement features" right into the operating system.
A number of the improvements (including new photo editing features) come courtesy of technology that RIM licensed from Scalado, a company that Nokia announced it was acquiring just this past June.
As part of the deal, however, Scalado mentioned that planning to "fulfill any and all obligations in relation to its existing customers," which includes RIM.
And the release is...
If you're looking to get your hands on some of the new camera tweaks to preview, you'll be waiting for a little while.
According to The Verge's Louis Goddard, the filters and frames can currently only be found on the Dev Alpha builds of Blackberry 10 – which require fancy development hardware (e.g. smartphones you don't own) to access.
Since Instagram is likely none to keen to release its own native app for the Blackberry platform, the new camera features in Blackberry 10 – hitting smartphones in the first quarter of 2013 – are the closest users are going to get to the spot-blur, radically colored images taken by their Android- and iOS-using peers.
Video, too
Crackberry also reports that Blackberry's video editing tools are getting a bit of a makeover in Blackberry 10.
However, the site hasn't expanded on what it's been able to uncover on that front.
There's no doubt, though, that the new tweaks will likely be designed to appeal to the touch-screen focus RIM's putting on its Blackberry smartphones going forward.
In other words, perhaps we'll see a bit of iOS-like video "pinching" built into the editing capabilities of Blackberry 10?
For a full look at the Instagram-like functionality hitting Blackberry 10, check out Crackberry's video below:
YouTube : http://youtu.be/LyyJdUQ2jOw