BlackBerry Bold set for India launch and manufacture

Research in Motion (RIM), the Canada-based manufacturer of BlackBerry mobile phones, announced on September 18, 2008, that it plans to launch the BlackBerry Bold, in India, during end-September to end-October 2008, at a price of Rs 34,990.

BlackBerry Bold

The Blackberry Bold will be sold by two of RIM’s partners, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar, in end-September 2008. The other partner, Reliance Communications, will launch the Blackberry Bold in October 2008. As of now, no announcement have been made whether the BlackBerry Bold will be sold through the remaining two partners, BPL Mobile and Tata Teleservices.

The latest BlackBerry Bold takes on the Apple iPhone, Nokia N96, Samsung, and HTC phones, in the Indian market. The BlackBerry Bold has brought together features and technologies from different BlackBerry phones, such as the BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Pearl, and BlackBerry 8800 series.

RIM also plans to manufacture handsets and set up logistics operations in India, to beef up its presence in the country.

Balsille has said that RIM plans to increase resources to manage Indian operations and set up manufacturing and logistics operations in India. He also said that RIM has special plans and programmes for India, and it is working closely with its carrier partners in India.

The latest BlackBerry was globally launched barely three weeks ago.

BlackBerry sales have been flat in 2007, in India. Apart from that, BlackBerry services came under scrutiny for security risks, in March 2008. BlackBerry has a very high level of encryption, which does not allow the government or defence agencies to examine it for misuse by anti-national elements. Defence agencies have demanded that BlackBerry’s encryption level should be lowered. So far, RIM has refused to do so. As yet, there are no signs of a settlement.

The BlackBerry Bold has a satin chrome finished black exterior with a leatherette backplate. The BlackBerry Bold display has a sharp 480×320 resolution LCD display.

The BlackBerry Bold that weighs 136 grams, has a full-QWERTY keyboard. The BlackBerry Bold supports WiFi network, and has a built-in GPS with BlackBerry Maps.

The BlackBerry Bold has a 2 megapixel camera, Roxio Media Manager application that allows users to sort, organise, view, copy or convert pictures, and dual speakers.

The BlackBerry Bold has a 1GB on-board storage memory and a 128MB flash memory. The BlackBerry Bold also provides support for microSD/SDHC memory card slot for memory expansion of up to 16GB.