Earlier this month, leaks surfaced about Research in Motion’s plan for their upcoming BlackBerry devices.  The leak includes a touchscreen phone codenamed “London”, a QWERTY BB10 device dubbed as  “Nevada”, and two more codenames, “Naples” and “Nashville”, which have no details yet.  It was also mentioned that a 10-inch PlayBook is in the works, referred to as “Blackforest”, expected to come out early 2013.

RIM has been in the slumps as they try to struggle with the dominance of Apple and Android, but what made the situation worse is when they announced that BB10 will be delayed yet again.  Instead of releasing this fall, BB10 will be released early next year.

But it looks like RIM has a little surprise for BlackBerry fans.

According to the Canadian blog site Mobile Syrup, RIM will be launching their 4G LTE PlayBook tomorrow, July 31st via Canada’s Bell and other networks are expected to carry the device soon after.  The 4G PlayBook features an enhanced 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 7-inch display with a resolution of 1024 x 600, 4G LTE (and HSPA+), operating system 2.0, 1GB RAM, 5MP rear camera that shoots 1080p HD videos, 3MP front camera, 4800 mAh battery, available in 32GB version, measures 130 x 193 x 9.7mm and weighs 425 grams.

The 4G PlayBook was announced during the 2011 Mobile World Congress and was expected to launch within the same year but due to unknown circumstances, RIM delayed its release.

Another leak indicates that RIM is ready to release, though not in the near future, a 10-inch 4G PlayBook believed to be the “Blackforest” mentioned above.  Vietnamese blog site Tinhte published photos of the 4G PlayBook.

Inspecting the photos, the 10-inch tablet looks just like the 7-inch PlayBook.  Looking at it, if you remove the “BlackBerry” logo on the front of the device, you might mistake it for Apple’s iPad.  But just like the RIM 7-inch tablet, it’s missing the iPad’s home button.   The internal components of the 10- and 7-inch PlayBooks look pretty much the same, the sizes just the differ.  The 10-inch version features a 26.82Wh Lithium ion battery compared to the smaller tablet’s 19.98Wh Lithium ion battery.  So we can expect that the bigger device would last longer when in use.

If the 10-inch PlayBook is already in production, why isn’t RIM releasing it?  Is there a possibility that the two 4G PlayBooks would be launched tomorrow?  Or would they still wait until 2013 before launching the bigger PlayBook?