After being released in several European countries as well as in
Canada, RIM's newest high-end smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold 9000, is getting ready to conquer Asia. The handset was officially announced for Singapore and Indonesia, thus it will become available (theoretically at least) to almost 240 million possible buyers (4.5 million in Singapore and 235 million in Indonesia).
In Singapore, the Bold will be on sale starting mid-September, for a price that, according to Research in Motion, should be set by the carriers offering it (this means that there will be at least two Singaporean carriers to bring the Bold).
In the world's largest archipelagic country, Indonesia, the new smartphone will hit the market a bit later – at the end of September. As in Singapore's case, the Indonesian price of the Bold will be announced by each of the mobile operators that intend to commercialize it (no word yet on which these will be, but Telkomsel and Indosat are most probably among them).
Coming in a wisely designed case that weighs 133 grams and measures 114 x 66 x 14 millimeters, BlackBerry Bold packs lots of features, some of them included for the first time in a RIM-made handset (like tri-band HSDPA connectivity): a 480 x 320 pixel landscape display, a full QWERTY keyboard, trackball navigation, Wi-Fi, BlackBerry Maps, GPS, full HTML browser, advanced email capabilities, Instant Messaging, DataViz Documents to Go, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash, Music and Video players, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, a 624 MHz CPU and 1GB of internal memory (expandable via a microSD / microSDHC card).
"The new BlackBerry Bold smartphone is an expression of performance and elegance. This is a truly advanced smartphone that enhances business and social connectivity with unparalleled functionality, usability and design," said Gregory Wade, regional vice president, Asia Pacific, Research In Motion.
In conclusion, Singaporean and Indonesian mobile users will soon have one of 2008's hottest smartphones, and if its price is not too high, the Bold has all the chances to be a hit in these countries.
