According to various sources and reports that are hitting us, RIM will announce the new BlackBerry 9000 on May 12th at the WES conference in Orlando Florida. In addition to the announcement of the 9000, the new BlackBerry will be christened with the name “BlackBerry Bold,” according what we have been hearing.

While the announcement is expected on the 12th, don’t expect to be able to buy one the same day, as we hear that the actual delivery of the 9000 is still a few weeks out beyond the announcement. As to who will get the 9000 first in the U.S., we suspect that AT&T will get the 9000 first and a CDMA version next likely for Verizon as some point later on.

It is unlikely that Sprint customers will see the 9000 any time soon, as they are just getting the BlackBerry Curve 8330, so it wouldn’t make sense that they would be at the head of the line to get the CDMA 9000.

As for features, the 9000 is 144mm in length, 66mm in width, and offers a thickness of 14mm. The weight with the battery, according to reports, is the same as the 88xx series. The battery life is about 13 days in standby and about 5 hours of actual talk time.

It features full GSM quad-band support as well as SPRS, Edge, and HDSPA network support. The 9000 will offer 802.11b/g wireless support. The display is a 65K 480x320 HVGA Transmissive TFT LCD.

For those BlackBerry users that want more video and audio support, the 9000 is sure to deliver with DivX 4, DivX 5/6 partial support as well as some support for XviD. H.263, H.264. and WMV3 are also supported.

The media player will be able to handle .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+. BlackBerry Media Sync allows you to transfer and play iTunes music on your BlackBerry, but we still a bit sketchy on how this will work. The 9000 will feature 1GB of onboard storage flash to store media, as well as an additional 128MB for applications.

The 9000 will feature a 2 megapixel camera with a 5x zoom. Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity will be standard, of course, with an enhanced USB port for faster transfers.

We expect that more specifics will be announced when RIM gives us the entire 9000 story on the 12th.