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Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) unveiled its long-awaited BlackBerry 6 operating system revamp, promising a redesigned user interface optimized for both touchscreens and trackpads, a new WebKit-based browser, expanded messaging features to simplify social media and RSS management, an upgraded multimedia experience and a new Universal Search tool. According to RIM, BlackBerry 6 offers multiple views to help consumers better organize their applications and content, with homescreen icons arranged in five customizable views–All, Favorites, Media, Downloads and Frequent–navigable via swiping. Users can organize where they want their icons to appear, and can add contacts and web shortcuts directly to the homescreen. Also new: context-sensitive Action Menus bringing an app’s most common tasks and actions to the surface–users can also multitask by holding down the Menu key, which generates a visual grid of all presently running apps, enabling toggling between them.

BlackBerry 6 boasts RIM’s new Social Feeds application, which integrates the native BlackBerry Messenger solution with services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Social Feeds offers an integrated view of friends’ activities across multiple social networks, enabling users to post updates across multiple services simultaneously–consumers can also incorporate their favorite RSS Feeds from the Social Feeds application or directly from a website while browsing. The new Text Messages app expands SMS and MMS communication, giving users the flexibility to view a conversation in one threaded chat as well as share photos, videos and related rich content.

RIM announced BlackBerry 6′s new WebKit-based browser in mid-February. The finished release includes tabs for accessing multiple sites simultaneously, an auto-wrap text zoom feature that wraps text in a column while maintaining the integrity of the webpage and a pinch-to-zoom option. BlackBerry 6 also introduces new music and video players–the new BlackBerry Desktop Software 6 integrates media sync for photos and videos as well as iTunes and Windows Media Player music. Additional upgrades include a range of camera modes, the Podcasts application and a dedicated YouTube application.

RIM will launch BlackBerry 6 in conjunction with the new Torch smartphone, also announced Tuesday and slated to hit retail via AT&T on Aug. 12. The new OS will roll out across existing BlackBerry smartphones including the BlackBerry Bold 9700, BlackBerry Bold 9650 and BlackBerry Pearl 3G in the months ahead.

RIM is betting the new OS will boost its fortunes in the increasingly competitive battle for smartphone supremacy–according to new Nielsen Company data, BlackBerry remains the U.S. market leader, representing 35 percent of smartphone subscribers nationwide, followed by Apple’s iPhone (28 percent), Microsoft’s Windows Mobile (15 percent, down from 27 percent a year ago) and Google’s Android (13 percent). However, only 42 percent of current BlackBerry users plan to stick with the platform when they make their next smartphone purchase.

For more on BlackBerry 6:  release