BlackBerry Bold 9000 makes official debut

Credit: RIM

World: Say hello to the RIM BlackBerry Bold. *Cue dramatic music* You may know it as the RIM BlackBerry 9000, but today, Research in Motion (RIM) officially took the wraps off the highly anticipated and much-rumoured smartphone, complete with a new name. The "Bold" is in reference to the smartphone's gorgeous display, but it's also bold in that it represents a number of new moves for the company. Oh, BlackBerry Bold, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways.

The bold and the beautiful
As we just mentioned, the device gets its name from its screen. The BlackBerry Bold features a half-VGA (480 by 320-pixel resolution), 65,000-colour display, and during some initial product testing, research group participants repeatedly called the screen "bold" and "brilliant". The Brilliant moniker didn't really jive with the company, thus the BlackBerry Bold was born.

So just how bold is it? Well, RIM stopped by our office late last week to show us the device, and let us just tell you, we were absolutely blown away. We can pretty much say we've never seen a better-looking display on a smartphone. Colours pop off the screen, and it's really amazing how sharp and crisp everything looks on the display. We watched a couple of videos, and for the first time, we didn't notice any of that pixelation or blurriness that you typically get with phones. In addition, the menu interface has been revamped with a much more modern look and icons.

Also, as you can see from the images, the BlackBerry Bold boasts a new design. It's more elegant than past models, with curvier edges and a silver trim that complements the black casing. If you turn it over, you'll also notice that the back has a leatherette texture. No more slick plastic and RIM will sell replaceable backplates in different colours, including blue, grey and red, if you want to spruce up your phone a bit. Size-wise, the BlackBerry Bold measures 114mm tall by 66mm wide by 12mm deep and weighs 135g.

Finally, the BlackBerry Bold has a new QWERTY keyboard that RIM likened to a modernised Curve keyboard, but we're not really seeing it. Instead it reminded us more of the BlackBerry 8830. Now, we know some of you 8800 series users had issue with the keyboard, but we tried it out and it's pretty easy to use — largish buttons with some spacing between the keys.

Credit: RIM

Wireless smorgasbord
There's a heaping of wireless options on the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) BlackBerry Bold, but the most appetising and notable item is the HSDPA/UMTS (850/1900/2100) support. It's the first HSDPA BlackBerry, and we all know it's been a long time coming. RIM says the delay for bringing such a device to the market is that it wanted to make sure battery life wouldn't be sacrificed at the expense of including the 3.5G technology. Hey, whatever the reason, we're just finally happy to have it. You also get integrated Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g), Bluetooth 2.0 with full A2DP support, and built-in GPS (enhanced and assisted).

Horsepower
The RIM BlackBerry Bold is equipped with a 624MHz Intel PXA270 processor whereas previous BlackBerrys had 312MHz processors, so technically, you should enjoy smoother and faster performance. During our briefing, there were a few hiccups in performance, but we're going to keep our fingers crossed and chalk it up to the fact that it wasn't a final unit. There's also 128MB flash memory and 1GB of on-board memory, which is all supplemented by the microSD/SDHC expansion slot (supports up to 16GB cards).

Multimedia, Web, and other good stuff
You still with us? We know this post is getting a bit lengthy, but just a few more highlights to note. First, the Bold includes an improved Web browser (thank goodness) with the option to view pages in a full desktop HTML style or a mobile version, and you can now more easily navigate pages with the trackball, which acts like a mouse cursor, and zoom in/out.

As for multimedia, the smartphone is equipped with a 2-megapixel camera with video-recording capabilities and up to 5x zoom. The media player also continues to support numerous audio and video formats, including MP3, WMA, AAC, DivX4, and WMV3 files, and the phone is equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack. By the way, the Bold has got some pretty powerful speakers — none of that weak, tinny junk.

Oh, and hey, what's this? It makes calls and sends and receives e-mails you say? Yes, you'll still get all of the voice and messaging features of previous BlackBerrys, and the handset will also come preloaded with Dataviz's Documents to Go suite for document viewing and editing.

"When and where can I get one?"
Now, that we've totally built up the device and you're ready to run out and buy one, here's the let-down. The RIM BlackBerry Bold isn't available quite yet. Nor has RIM announced pricing, though if you consider the BlackBerry Pearl 8120 sold for AU$659 then our guess is that the Bold will sell for around AU$800 with worldwide availability expected "this summer".