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May 13, 2008
BlackBerry
Unveils 'Bold' Version
By Gurmukh
Singh
Toronto
To broaden its 14-million customer base, BlackBerry maker Research
in Motion, based at Waterloo near here, Monday unveiled a new and
sleeker version of the wireless device that is a style statement
among professionals and corporates around the world.
Called the BlackBerry Bold, the new smartphone comes with a variety
of new features. Labelled as model number 9000, it will be priced
between $300 and $400 and hit the market this summer.
This will be the first BlackBerry to support tri-band HSDPA
high-speed cellular networks around the world and feature integrated
GPS, Wi-Fi and a set of multimedia capabilities, the company said in
a statement Monday.
``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,'' company president and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis
said.
Apart from the usual BlackBerry applications, including phone,
email, messaging, and organizer and browser, the BlackBerry Bold
will also feature 624 MHz mobile processor for quick downloading of
email attachments, streaming video or rendering web pages, 128 MB
Flash memory and one GB on-board storage memory.
``With this powerful new smartphone, users can even talk on the
phone while sending and receiving email or accessing the web, and
download Word, Excel or PowerPoint files and edit them directly on
the handset using the preloaded DataViz Documents to Go suite,'' the
company statement said.
Thanks to its high-resolution, ultra-bright display and its color
LCD fused to the undersurface of the lens, users will get vibrant
and razor-sharp pictures, while videos play smoothly and web pages,
documents, presentations and messages snap with exceptional quality
and contrast, the company claimed.
The BlackBerry Bold will make on-the-go browsing a whole new
experience, with the trackball mimicking a mouse, and making it
easier to navigate sites or to zoom in on specific parts of a web
page.
Users can also choose between the full desktop-style HTML content
and layout or the mobile version. It also features a two-megapixel
camera for video recording, built-in flash and 5x digital zoom.
The device will also allow users connectivity to protected wireless
networks. With its enhanced media player, users can display pictures
and slideshows quickly, play movies in full screen mode, and manage
their music collection.
The BlackBerry has a customer base of about 14 million, mostly
corporate executives and professionals who use it for sending secure
wireless emails.
However, the Canadian giant in wireless connectivity, which operates
in North America, Europe and Asia, says about a third of its
subscribers are non-corporate types, including ordinary consumers.
To woo this market, the company is launching new devices soon.
May 13, 2008
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