RIM unveils slick Porsche BlackBerry phone. Price tag? Just $1,890.

People having a mid-life crisis have been known to get themselves a Porsche in an attempt to feel more beautiful, youthful and cooler. Now, it’s Research In Motion’s turn.

The latest Porsche to hit the market is a marvel of sleek engineering, filled with gleaming stainless steel and hand-stretched leather. It also fits in your shirt pocket.

That’s because it happens to be not a car, but a BlackBerry. Research In Motion unveiled its latest, slickest-looking smart phone yet this week, the Porsche Design P’9981. The phone was co-designed by RIM and Porsche Design, a subsidiary of the German sports car manufacturer.

It retails for a mere $1,890 in Canada, at the Porsche Design store in Yorkville. In other select markets where it’s been released, it’s already got some celebrity fans — Kanye West has reportedly bought fellow musicians Jay-Z and Beyonce Porsche phones.

For that price, you get not only the gleaming new piece of hardware, but a custom Porsche-designed user interface, a unique PIN that identifies you as a P’9981 owner, a 1.2 gigahertz processor, 8 gigs of memory, and a 5 megapixel camera, and a browser that RIM hopes will speed you down the information autobahn.

It’s a project that RIM leaped at when approached by Porsche Design two years ago, said Todd Wood, RIM’s senior vice president for industrial design.

“When they came knocking, it was such a fantastic opportunity,” said Wood.

For Wood’s inner design geek, it was also a thrill to work with Porsche Design, the company started by Ferdinand Alexander Porsche in 1972. The grandson of the auto maker’s founder was the one who designed the company’s iconic 911 sports car.

“I learned about him in design school, so to go over there and work with that company that he created was great. There were a few times I had to pinch myself,” said Wood.

The new BlackBerry runs on RIM’s BlackBerry 7.1 operating system. It won’t be able to run the long-awaited BB10 operating system when it’s launched, likely this fall, Wood confirmed.

“It won’t be backwards compatible,” Wood said.