With a proven track record of coming across smartphones before they are launched, the Vietnamese website tinhte.vn, has released photos and video of the yet-to-be-officially-announced BlackBerry Curve (Apollo).

Seems the phone’s broken out of a manufacturing plant and into their hands for a photo and video session.

Although the voice-over explaining what is going on is in Vietnamese rather than English, that doesn’t mean we can't ogle. The thin smartphone still sports a QWERTY keyboard, but as expected, adds a touchscreen display like the newly announced BlackBerry Bold 9900.

As with the company’s Bold handset, the new look Curve, or Apollo, looks to be worth an upgrade for current Curve owners and comes with a 480x360 pixel resolution touchscreen and an 800Mhz Marvell Tavor CPU MG-1 processor. There’s also a 5-megapixel camera around back, although judging by the pictures the phone is still running BlackBerry OS 6 rather than BB7.

RIM has yet to officially announce the launch of the Apollo or Curve, as it is likely to be know as, however rumours and pictures have been circling for the last couple of months.

Following the launch of an update for the Bold at BlackBerry World in Florida earlier in the month, we would expect RIM to announce the launch of this phone in the next couple of months if not sooner.