The BlackBerry Pearl and Curve models began the trend and the BlackBerry Bold, billed by many as RIM's answer to Apple's iPhone, makes its entrance as the all-singing, all-dancing range-topping BlackBerry.
RIM launched the Bold here last week, with stock expected to hit the market in mid-August.
The Bold is the first multimedia BlackBerry to be able to handle the speedier HSDPA 3G mobile data pipes. The more traditional 8707G was the first 3G BlackBerry sold here.
Publicly RIM says it's happy for competitors such as Apple to come in and lift the overall smartphone market and RIM front man Dennis Kavelman has even offered to buy Apple's Steve Jobs a drink for his efforts (blackberry and vodka perhaps). Under the spin, the Canadian smartphone maker is protective of its fat business smartphone market share and wants to lift its game in the consumer market.
RIM feels the new Bold is the gadget that will hold the line against the likes of Apple, and the new phone has some features that surpass the iPhone.
There's a 2.0 megapixel camera with flash and video capability (the iPhone has a rudimentary 2mp camera without flash or video), a separate camera for video calling (the iPhone can't do video calls), a micro SD slot to supplement the Bold's 1GB for storage and 128MB of system memory built in (the iPhone comes with a minimum of 8GB but can't be upgraded) and a long-life, replaceable 1500mAh battery. The iPhone has to be sent back to a service centre if the battery dies.
Unlike the somewhat slippery iPhone, the Bold has a grippy leather backing with a chrome screen surround. The Bold measures 114mm by 66mm by 15mm.
The two phones have a similar footprint, but the Bold is 2.7mm thicker and 3 grams heavier than the iPhone.
There's also a snappy 624MHz processor, a loudish speaker, GPS navigation, WiFi and a universal 3.5mm headphone socket.
Both the iPhone and the Bold have Bluetooth but the Bold can double as a tethered modem - which is very handy for supplying bandwidth to a notebook on the road - while the iPhone can't do the Bluetooth modem trick.
The Bold sports a small but high-res 480 by 320 pixel screen with a trackball for navigation and full QWERTY keypad for input, while the iPhone sports a much larger, 3.5in, 480 by 320 pixel touchscreen.
Here is where the two diverge sharply in design and philosophy.
With its much larger screen, the iPhone is a terrific handheld viewing platform for text, pictures and movies, especially for those with ageing eyeballs, and its clever touchscreen-driven user interface is state of the smartphone art.
The Bold's much smaller screen and trackball-driven user interface are functional enough but I found the iPhone easier to drive and better to watch. When it comes to text input, the BlackBerry has the edge, with its more positive mini-keyboard surpassing the iPhone's pop-up touch keypad.
The Bold syncs up through the simple-to-use BlackBerry Desktop Manager and can suck down unlicensed iTunes music through the new Media Sync tool.
Onboard applications range from media players, GPS mapping, calendering, email and web browsing to productivity apps such as the Word To Go and Sheet To Go document handlers.
There are a few games such as Texas Hold 'Em and, like Apple's App Store, supplied applications can be supplemented with free and pay programs, which are available online.
When it comes to hooking into enterprise email and applications the Bold supports Microsoft, Lotus and Novell servers and there are BlackBerry versions of many enterprise apps.
RIM claims the data compression used by the corporate-only BlackBerry Enterprise email server chops expensive 3G data usage five-fold compared with other smartphones.
RIM's service came under fire last year when a major server outage in the US disrupted BlackBerry communications worldwide. RIM has been spreading its server infrastructure around the world to boost redundancy, but RIM could not say when it would build a data centre in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Bold may be parsimonious with data, but RIM says the latest BlackBerry is designed to create handset envy among high achievers. "Our job in recent years has been to disguise this tool as something fashionable."
RIM launched the Bold here last week, with stock expected to hit the market in mid-August.
The Bold is the first multimedia BlackBerry to be able to handle the speedier HSDPA 3G mobile data pipes. The more traditional 8707G was the first 3G BlackBerry sold here.
Publicly RIM says it's happy for competitors such as Apple to come in and lift the overall smartphone market and RIM front man Dennis Kavelman has even offered to buy Apple's Steve Jobs a drink for his efforts (blackberry and vodka perhaps). Under the spin, the Canadian smartphone maker is protective of its fat business smartphone market share and wants to lift its game in the consumer market.
RIM feels the new Bold is the gadget that will hold the line against the likes of Apple, and the new phone has some features that surpass the iPhone.
There's a 2.0 megapixel camera with flash and video capability (the iPhone has a rudimentary 2mp camera without flash or video), a separate camera for video calling (the iPhone can't do video calls), a micro SD slot to supplement the Bold's 1GB for storage and 128MB of system memory built in (the iPhone comes with a minimum of 8GB but can't be upgraded) and a long-life, replaceable 1500mAh battery. The iPhone has to be sent back to a service centre if the battery dies.
Unlike the somewhat slippery iPhone, the Bold has a grippy leather backing with a chrome screen surround. The Bold measures 114mm by 66mm by 15mm.
The two phones have a similar footprint, but the Bold is 2.7mm thicker and 3 grams heavier than the iPhone.
There's also a snappy 624MHz processor, a loudish speaker, GPS navigation, WiFi and a universal 3.5mm headphone socket.
Both the iPhone and the Bold have Bluetooth but the Bold can double as a tethered modem - which is very handy for supplying bandwidth to a notebook on the road - while the iPhone can't do the Bluetooth modem trick.
The Bold sports a small but high-res 480 by 320 pixel screen with a trackball for navigation and full QWERTY keypad for input, while the iPhone sports a much larger, 3.5in, 480 by 320 pixel touchscreen.
Here is where the two diverge sharply in design and philosophy.
With its much larger screen, the iPhone is a terrific handheld viewing platform for text, pictures and movies, especially for those with ageing eyeballs, and its clever touchscreen-driven user interface is state of the smartphone art.
The Bold's much smaller screen and trackball-driven user interface are functional enough but I found the iPhone easier to drive and better to watch. When it comes to text input, the BlackBerry has the edge, with its more positive mini-keyboard surpassing the iPhone's pop-up touch keypad.
The Bold syncs up through the simple-to-use BlackBerry Desktop Manager and can suck down unlicensed iTunes music through the new Media Sync tool.
Onboard applications range from media players, GPS mapping, calendering, email and web browsing to productivity apps such as the Word To Go and Sheet To Go document handlers.
There are a few games such as Texas Hold 'Em and, like Apple's App Store, supplied applications can be supplemented with free and pay programs, which are available online.
When it comes to hooking into enterprise email and applications the Bold supports Microsoft, Lotus and Novell servers and there are BlackBerry versions of many enterprise apps.
RIM claims the data compression used by the corporate-only BlackBerry Enterprise email server chops expensive 3G data usage five-fold compared with other smartphones.
RIM's service came under fire last year when a major server outage in the US disrupted BlackBerry communications worldwide. RIM has been spreading its server infrastructure around the world to boost redundancy, but RIM could not say when it would build a data centre in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Bold may be parsimonious with data, but RIM says the latest BlackBerry is designed to create handset envy among high achievers. "Our job in recent years has been to disguise this tool as something fashionable."
www.1staudovisual.com.au
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