The much-awaited upgrade to RIM’s Blackberry phones has just hit India and Blackberry fans can finally look forward to some serious upgrade fun.
The Blackberry Bold 9900, one of the three models that were globally unveiled a week ago by RIM as part of its new line-up, has been launched by web retailer Letsbuy.com for Rs 31,500 (USD 700).
The Blackberry Bold 9900 represents the candy-bar shaped phone among the three that have so far been announced. The other two are the Blackberry Torch 9850 (with a full touch 3.7 inch display) and the touch-cum-qwerty-slider Blackberry 9810. The others have not been launched in India yet.
The Blackberry Bold 9900 will undoubtedly be the phone to look up to for those who like the traditional candy-bar form factor.
Though it is often compared to the Nokia E-6 (Rs 17,000), it is strictly a different type of beast.
The Blackberry Bold 9900, for one, has perhaps the largest screen of any candy-bar phone, at 2.8 inch (against 2.6 for Nokia E6).
It has the most powerful heart of all enterprise phones in India, a 1.2 GHz single core processor (twice that of Nokia E6) and a separate graphics processor.
In addition, RIM has also splurged on the most crucial aspect of its phones — the keypad. The Blackberry Bold 9900 has perhaps the most comfortable and effective keypad of all qwerty phones, thanks partly to its size (the largest among Blackberry models).
The Bold is perhaps the second phone model (after the iPhone4) that can lay claim to the ‘retina display’ distinction. In other words, with a pixel density of 287 per inch, the Blackberry Bold 9900’s screen is so finely-grained that the human eye will not be able to detect the ‘artificiality’ of the images on it when held at normal usage distances.
That, of course, is due to the high resolution (640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high) of the display.
The Bold 9900 records 720p normal HD video, has a 5 MP still camera and has 14.4 Mbps of 3G download speed.
The graphics processor on the Bold 9900 is there primarily because RIM has totally revamped its user-interface. The UI (look and feel) is now much more ‘hip’ and animated, thanks to the upgrade to Blackberry OS 7 and its ‘liquid graphics’ technology.
The phone has also got good reviews for its looks, particularly its metal rim which, according to some, lends it an iPhone-like beauty.
No word yet on the availability of the full-touch or slider-hybrid version in India yet, though there have been some announcements in the US.
For details on the new line-up from RIM, see Sprint announces the latest and greatest Blackberries: Bold 9930 & Torch 9850