RIM patents BlackBerry 10 keyboard

In May, RIM showed us a developer alpha device that was running a develop preview of the company’s next generation platform. As BlackBerry 10 was built from the ground up for touch based devices, rather than traditional BlackBerry devices donning QWERTY keyboards, RIM has to build a compelling keyboard experience for touch and now Engadget is reporting that RIM has managed to patent this keyboard.
According to the patent filling, the keyboard can intelligently predict the next word typed by the user and common expressions. While we already know many third party and first party keyboards that boasts of this feature, perhaps RIM has something new up its sleeve, so we will wait and watch.
The filling is interesting because RIM has itself confirmed that it licenses SwiftKey’s technology for the BlackBerry 10 keyboard, however we have also noted that the unique way in which the BB10 keyboard provides predictive words over alphabets in the keyboard and the way the user has to swipe an alphabet to implement the prediction is unique to BB10.