We already told you the new about the upcoming new member of the BlackBerry Bold family codenamed Dakota. In addition, we also told you that AT&T was closing out the remaining Bold 9000 inventory that it has. Sources now tell us that the company is also moving the last of the Bold 9700 inventory and apparently has no plans to obtain more.

The reason is that sources tell us that the new Bold, or Dakota if you will, is a bit closer than we were first led to believe. Apparently from the whispers we hear, AT&T could have the new member of the Bold family on the shelf for sale as soon as early or mid-spring, but significant quantity is likely not expected at the store and authorized reseller level till very early summer.

In the meantime, the company has elected to focus on the sale of the new BlackBerry slider known as the Torch 9800. Recently, AT&T has added both a red and white version of the Torch 9800 to the line up at AT&T. In addition to the Torch, the company plans to focus their sales efforts on the Curve 3G and Pearl 3G for customers that need a BlackBerry but do not want the Torch 9800.

While sales of the Torch 9800 have been a bit slow, the introduction of the new colors in conjunction to very aggressive pricing with a two-year contract have contributed to a bit of a momentum shift which has helped Torch 9800 sales start moving again.

Success of the Torch 9800 is critical for RIM, who is planning to bring a new Torch model to market which right now is simply known as Torch 2. The Torch 2 is said to address the criticisms lobbed at the 9800 in a variety of reviews; the Torch 2 is expected to offer a much more powerful CPU, which is said to be clocked at 1.2GHz and a much more robust VGA resolution screen. It is also expected that the Torch 2 will be running version 6.1 of the BlackBerry OS when it arrives in Q3 of 2011.