After being bandied about the blogosphere last week, Sprint announced it would indeed offer the BlackBerry Style known previously in some circles as the Oxford on Oct. 31.

Sprint describes the Style 9760 as an elegant, flip smartphone featuring a full QWERTY keyboard and a wide range of advanced communications and multimedia capabilities. Perhaps most importantly, its the first smartphone offered by Sprint with the updated BlackBerry 6 operating systems.

The Style has a 5-megapixel camera with flash and support for video recording. It also has a built-in GPS for location-based apps and geo-tagging, Wi-Fi for faster connectivity and extended data coverage, and an expandable memory slot for up to 32GB of additional storage.

The phone includes an optical trackpad for fluid navigation and boasts two large displays, an external screen for quickly viewing notifications and messages, and a high-resolution internal display that Sprint says makes Web browsing or watching videos a pleasure. It will be available in steel grey and royal purple.

BlackBerry 6 features a redesigned interface and includes expanded messaging capabilities with intuitive features to simplify the management of social networking and RSS feeds. It also designed to provide integrated access to BBM, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and various instant messaging applications that are preinstalled. BlackBerry 6 also integrates a new and rich WebKit-based browser that renders HTML Web pages (as well as HTML e-mail) quickly.

And the price is nice just $99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year service agreement.