BlackBerry Bold 9700 announced by RIM

RIM has announced its latest BlackBerry Bold, the Black Bold 9700, that will replace the existing BlackBerry Bold.

New Blackberry Bold 9700 photo

One would have thought it would be difficult to top the current extremely popular Bold, but BlackBerry has pulled it off with aplomb.

In August 2009, there were rumors that the next BlackBerry Bold, codenamed the BlackBerry Onyx, would be smaller and sleeker than the BlackBerry Bold 9700 but would retain many of its features. Most of the rumors have turned out to be true.  The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is indeed a sleeker slimmer version of the existing BlackBerry Bold.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 measures 109 mm x 60 mm x 14.1 mm and weighs 122 gms with battery compared to the BlackBerry Bold 9000 that measures 114 x 66 x 14 mm that weighs133 gms. It has lost the thick metal surround of the BlackBerry Bold 9000 and now sports a dark chrome frame and a smooth leatherette back.

The new Bold has a 2.44-inch TFT LCD display screen with a resolution of 480×360 pixels, up from the 480 x 320 pixels resolution of the old BlackBerry Bold.

The trackball found in the BlackBerry Bold has been replaced by a touch-sensitive trackpad. Users can move their fingers over the trackpad to explore menus and then press and click to select an item of their choice.

The phone has a 3.5-mm stereo headset jack and sports dedicated Send, End, Menu, Escape, Left/Right Convenience keys, 2 x Volume/Zoom, Sleep, and Mute keys.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 comes with a 3.2-mega pixel camera with auto focus, image stabilization, flash, and 2X digital zoom compared to the 2-megapixel camera with LED flash found in the old BlackBerry Bold.

The phone offer video camera recording in normal mode (480 x 352 pixel) and MMS Mode (176 x 144 pixel).

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 runs the new BlackBerry OS 5.0 found in the BlackBerry Storm.

Blackberry Bold 9700 comes with touchpad instead of trackball

The phone is 3G compatible and is available in two versions, UMTS at 2100/1900/850/800 MHz quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM, and UMTS/HSDPA 2100/1700/900 MHz and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM.

Like the BlackBerry Bold, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 offers integrated GPS with A-GPS, and BlackBerry Maps.

Connectivity features include Bluetooth v2.1, Wi-Fi with specifications of 802.11 b/g and support for Wi-Fi calling via UMA at available hot spots.

Multimedia specifications

• 256 MB integrated memory
• Support for DivX 4, DivX 5/6 partially supported, XviD partially supported, H.263, H.264, WMV3, MPEG4, Sorenson Spark & On2 VP6 (Flash support) video formats
• Support for .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro / WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
• audio formats
• The company has said that users can sync data and audio files from their PCs to the BlackBerry Bold 9700, and avail of 35 hours of music playback time.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 comes with 256 MB of on-board flash memory, 2GB card and a microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports up to 16 GB cards, and is expected to support 32 GB cards when available.

Battery Specifications

Battery:      1500 mAh removable/rechargeable cryptographic Lithium-cell battery
Talk Time:  up to 6 hours (up to 5 hours with BlackBerry Bold)
Standby Time: Up to 21 days/504 hours on GSM) and up to 17 days/408 hours on UMTS
Standby Time for BlackBerry Bold: Up to 310 h

BlackBerry 9700 users will be able to access BlackBerry App World that offers mobile apps, such as games, IM, social networking – exlusively developed for BlackBerry smartphones.

The BlackBerry 9700 smartphone will be available in November 2009. The price of the phone has not been revealed as yet.

As far as its launch in India goes, usually RIM takes a few months to introduce its new phones in the country. For example, the Blackberry Storm 2 has not yet been introduced in India. Price of the Blackberry Bold 9700 in India though is likely to be pretty close to that of the current Bold, as is normal with the company.