That’s mostly a crappy pun really – the worst-kept secret of the year was the BlackBerry 9000, with images hitting the Interweb over a month ago. Yesterday – and coinciding with WES – the 9000 emerged as the BlackBerry Bold. The BBC covered the Bold’s release stating that it’s a “move away from business” and an effort to “attract more casual users”. Certainly the second point may be true, but the spec of the Bold still makes it very suitable for the business user. A higher-resolution screen, Wi-Fi, GPS, and support for 3G – but also better facilities for playing music and a 2 megapixel camera.
It looks very tasty, not a million miles away from the Palm Treo 500. It certainly makes my 8800 look a little dated, in fact it makes the Curve (8300) look a little dated. Mind you, I’m sitting next to a colleague with a 8700 and that baby looks positively prehistoric (the 8700, not my colleague).
And they offer a free upgrade from my newly acquired 7130v ………. oh, hang on, I’m in dreamland, watching Glasgow Rangers winning 3-0 against Zenit St Petersburg
Looks very nice, but later this year, RIM will really have a go at the iPhone.
An all new touchscreen Blackberry called the Thunder is slated for launch sometime around September.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/05/12/daily83.html?ana=yfcpc
Add to this the impending launch of the 3G iPhone and maybe all of the other smartphone manufacturers should pack up and go home now. 🙂
How very exciting. I seem to hev been given a Pearl which I wasn’t expecting. It’s almost, almost small enough to be a phone but that keyboard is the horror for SMS so in the drawer it goes… SonyEricsson for life. yo.
Rob, you might wanna keep that quiet, someone who has been unlucky enough to be allocated one of the old models would want to take that Pearl off your hands.
Steve, I’m not sure I like the idea of a touch-screen Berry. An iPod touch-screen is fine because interaction tends to be big simple movements. But with a Berry there’s a lot of typing so the idea might not work so well. However, maybe six months from now I’ll be trying to blag one from my contacts at RIM. I was already considering trying to blag a Bold and may be dropping some hints soon.
Blag away…
The media here in the US have already dubbed it the Touchberry.