Canada’s Research in Motion has announced its new BlackBerry Bold 9000, the company’s first new smartphone platform in two years. The BlackBerry Bold takes solid aim at the business and professional market, improving the BlackBerry’s raw performance by rolling in a 624 MHz processor and 3G wireless broadband capability, along with a new 480 by 320-pixel LCD display.
"The new BlackBerry Bold represents a tremendous step forward in business-grade smartphones and lives up to its name with incredible speed, power, and functionality, all wrapped in a beautiful and confident design," said RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis, in a statement.
Under the hood, the BlackBerry Bold packs a 624 MHz Marvell Tavor PXA930 processor, which should help speed along the BlackBerry’s everyday activities as well as the phone’s new media-centric capabilities. The unit incudes 128 MB of flash memory, 1 GB of onboard storage, plus support for SDHC cards capable of carrying up to 16 GB. The BlackBerry Bold packs an integrated GPS, 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi wireless networking, and (at least for now) supports HSDPA tri-band 3G mobile data services. The phone also features a two megapixel video-capable camera, dual speakers, and (of course) video playback capability and the capability to sync music collections with iTunes (via a new BlackBerry Media Sync application). The integrated GPS enables users to tap into BlackBerry Maps and other location-based services, as well as geo-tag photos. And, of course, the BlackBerry Bold supports the device’s well-known line of communication and productivity software, including full-HTML Web browsing, enterprise-capable email and messaging, and DataViz’s Documents To Go suite for accessing Microsoft Office documents.
The BlackBerry Bold is the first of a series in a new smartphone platform from the U.S.’s leading smartphone maker: eventually, phones, in the 900 series will be available in a variety of form factors on both CDMA and GSM networks—even an AWS-capable 1700 MHz version for T-Mobile’s network.
According to RIM, the BlackBerry Bold should be available from carriers worldwide "beginning this summer"—we’re assuming that refers to the northern hemisphere—although the company hasn’t yet released any pricing information.
Microsoft and RIM have also announced an agreement to bring Windows Live services to BlackBerry smartphones "beginning this summer," starting with Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger for Blackberry.
