BlackBerry Pearl 9100 Stratus Arriving December 15th?

Ready to get the next Pearl 9100? It may be coming sooner than you think. At least, an online cellphone retailer thinks so. You might have seen that we recently got our hands on a Pearl 9100 Stratus. We will dub it the 'Onyx Mini' as it felt and was almost a miniature of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 minus the full qwerty, but we'll get into more impressions at a later date. While we heard the release date wasn't too far off we couldn't help but begin a quest to find the answer. Needless to say, Popular Electronics, has started taking pre-orders for the BlackBerry Pearl 9100 and listing it with a $399.99 price-tag and a release date of December 15th, 2009!

We contacted Popular Electronics, who is in fact taking pre-orders, but they could not confirm the date. So why post that date? Your guess is as good as ours. Perhaps that's when shipments will arrive? Who knows. Nevertheless, they must know the Pearl 9100 will be in distribution and possibly soon. Otherwise, we think it wouldn't make much sense to list so soon, except to announce it will be arriving. We're predicting the GSM model will release Q1 of 2010 and the LTE model releasing Q2 of 2010. Do you think the rumored April 2010 release date is on point? What's your gut telling you the date might be?