RIM has been taking some real risks with the Blackberry brand lately; the BlackBerry Kickstart, is the company's first clamshell phone; and the Blackberry Thunder/Storm is the company's first touch phone, but it turns out that the Blackberry Bold is one experiment they would prefered not taking.

The Boy Genuis has sources telling him that the only reason Blackberry designed the Blackberry Bold is because AT&T essentially demanded it, saying if you want to stay in business you'll make us a 3G phone. Only since Blackberry has no experience making 3G phones, the release date kept on getting pushed back, from early summer to October 2 on AT&T, virtually the last country to carry it, even though AT&T basically commissioned the Bold.

Here's Boy Genuis on how technical gliches grew into a full on rift:

"First and foremost, according to what we have been told, AT&T approached RIM to build the BlackBerry Bold for them. RIM had zero plans of manufacturing a 3G device at the time. They reluctantly gave in to AT&T and started to manufacture the Bold. You can see their non-3G stance with the upcoming Kickstart, Javelin, etc.  As it was put to us, “AT&T will not be accepting any non-3G phones on it’s network.” We’ve clearly seen this transition take place; we’re almost at the point of all 3G handset heaven, so this statement makes sense. The problem with the delays of the Bold is that RIM has the Thunder/Storm up their sleeves. We’ll get into that in a bit, but here’s a quick story on the Bold delays and why they happened.

To be fair, the delay with the BlackBerry Bold wasn’t really AT&T’s fault. Sure, they might have wanted to give Apple a little more shine or they might even have wanted to let their 90-day exclusive run out through the holidays to capture all those extra sales, but there were, and still are software issues. That’s evidenced by people that have bought the Bold already.

...the Bold is the most un-BlackBerry-like device to come out of RIM in terms of stability and the OS. AT&T knew this. That’s why RIM would hand AT&T (and Rogers, too) “final final” builds of the OS. After a couple days, those were promptly sent back to RIM with “FAIL” written all over them. That continued for a very, very long time. Nonetheless, it came to the point where Rogers went ahead and released the device; it’s not 100%, and they, along with RIM, know that."

Anyway, that AT&T didn't cut RIM as much slack as much as Canada's Rogers did in terms of bugs in the operating system, seems to be the source of the bad blood with RIM. As the partnership seems to be on the backburner for both companies, don't be shocked if the Bold's American release gets pushed back even further.