An unknown source revealed to The Wall Street Journal that RIM is expected to formally announce the existence of its much-rumored tablet next week at the developer conference in San Francisco. Though it will not go out of the market till the last quarter of this year, at least we can expect an additional player amongst the competition.

RIM purchased the domain blackpad.com, which has brought us to calling this new tablet “BlackPad” with a 7-inch screen slightly smaller than that of the iPad. It will have its own wifi access capabilities but connected to the Blackberry phone for 3G services which makes it a companion device to the Blackberry smartphone. This means that the BlackPad will not be sold via carriers unlike the BlackBerry mobile phones.

The Journal says that the tablet will use a new OS from QNX as opposed to a previous report that brought up BlackBerry 6 mobile OS. In fact, the QNX software might as well replace all the software on RIM smartphones.

It appears to be a bold move from RIM, particularly as tablets so far have become extensions of smartphones’ proof of concept for virtualization trends within the growing app markets.  As RIM has faced a great deal of scrutiny over its devices and mobile OS, the change in direction may be a positive one for the firm.