Good news for T-Mobile USA's subscribers in search of a new BlackBerry smartphone: the fourth largest North American mobile operator now features RIM's new BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 on its official website. This means that the handset will pretty soon be in stores – you can pre-register here to find out when this happens. 

Announced by the Canadian manufacturer less than one week ago (on September 10), the new Pearl 8220 is RIM's first and only smartphone to come in a clamshell form factor. This could attract lots of users who might have gotten bored with the "always candybar" devices that Research in Motion has released until now.

If we don't take intro consideration the unusual form factor of BlackBerry 8220, the new smartphone is pretty much like the previously released Pearl devices. This means that it comes with similar features, including: quad-band GSM connectivity (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) with GPRS and EDGE, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording, Wi-Fi, BlackBerry Maps, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, Music and Video players, HTML browser, email, Instant Messaging, DataViz document viewer & editor and expandable memory (up to 8GB).

The Flip 8220 also brings a QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) TFT internal display, a SureType QWERTY keyboard (considerably larger than the ones of other Pearl smartphones), a 3.5mm headset jack and a 900 mAh battery that should last up to 4 hours of talk-time or up to 360 hours in stand-by mode – all these in a case that weighs 102 grams and measures 101 x 50 x 17.5 millimeters.

T-Mobile has not posted the price of BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 yet, but North American users should hope the handset will not be too expensive. Or at least not much more expensive than the Pearl 8120 model, which is currently sold for $149.99 (after a $50 mail-in rebate and the signing of a contract agreement for two years).