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Research in Motion has been releasing unofficial photos and information on the net regarding its new Blackberry Bold 9700, alternately known as Bold II or Onyx, was way ahead of any official announcement of its release. Online speculation about a BlackBerry handset codenamed Onyx has been circulating about for quite some time now with the first photos appearing as are early as last May.
It is only now that the real thing is surfacing. T-Mobile in the US already has it as its first ever 3G Blackberry handset. Expected to become available in November in the US at an introductory $599 off contract, the new Blackberry is equipped to make use of T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home service where users get visual voicemail, corporate mail as well as UMA WiFi voice calls. There has been speculation if its UMA capability is ready for commercial use, and it seems to be true.
Getting it Right This Time
This is the traditional non-touchscreen QWERTY phone made famous by Blackberry. RIM finally got the mobile phone right after all those half-baked models that came out over the last few months. Previous RIM BlackBerry models always lack a major feature like the previous Bold’s pathetic camera, the Curve 8900 lack of 3G, the Tour 9630’s WiFi absence and the Storm’s inadequate memory and quirky OS.
This time, RIM has everything that was lacking on these models on its latest BlackBerry Bold. You have 3G/SHDPA/HSUPA, WiFi 802.11 b/g, GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera – all in a slim and compact QWERTY smartphone in the candybar form factor.
It seems RIM engineers finally got all to work and did it on a much smaller size than any of its earlier brothers. BlackBerry is clearly learning from other mobile phone makers with exceedingly more sophisticated handsets that came a lot earlier than anything Blackberry has.
Features
T-Mobile in the US has affirmed the new BlackBerry will have the TeleNav GPS Navigator together with the Amazon MP3 store access bundled . It’s interesting that RIM hasn’t made the Bold 9700 official as of this time. But the technical specifications circulating online have the following to look forward to when it becomes available next month.
- The new Bold handset will sport a touch sensitive trackpad similarly found on the Curve 8520 as opposed to the trackball on its other earlier models. Sample handset photos on the net reveal it has a leather backed battery cover that lends some classy elegance to an otherwise bland QWERTY candy bar form.
- It’s a quad-band 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE and a 3G/UMTS with HSDPA and HSUPA support that most other smartphones even priced lower has for enabling fast surfing and downloading over the Internet.
- The processor is speculated to be a Texas Instrument Tavor running at a higher clock speed than its predecessor’s 624 MHz. It uses RIM’s proprietary OS 5.0 platform. There’s GPS, WiFi 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 though it’s not certain whether there’s A2DP support for wireless stereo headsets.
- It’s common knowledge that Blackberry handsets are popular among companies equipping their executives and employees with it. But as a nod to the consumer mobile phones that’s also has a decent camera besides, the Bold 9700 conforms to the typical 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera and LED Flash.
The Blackberry Bold 9700 has a smallish 256 MB of internal memory that seems to be shared across most of its recent models and gets microSD support. Unlike most other smartphones, the SD slot is inside and you still need to take out the battery cover to insert the memory card.
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Tags: Blackberry-Bold-9700
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