14 DAY TRIAL // The first three largest mobile operators in India, Airtel, Reliance and Vodafone, have announced the future availability of RIM's latest smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold 9000, and it seems that all of them will be offering the device for the same retail price: 34,990 INR (meaning $755 or 525 Euros).
Airtel and Vodafone will be the first carriers to make the Bold available to their customers, sometime at the end of September, while Reliance will release the smartphone about a month later, at the end of October.
For those who don't know yet, BlackBerry Bold is the most advanced smartphone created by Research in Motion so far. The device includes a wide range of high-end features, like: quad-band GSM/EDGE and tri-band HSDPA connectivity (the first BlackBerry with tri-band 3G), a wide 480 x 320 pixel TFT display, a full QWERTY keyboard, perfect for users who text and email a lot from their mobile device, trackball navigation, internal GPS, BlackBerry Maps, full HTML browser that goes hand in hand with the built-in Wi-Fi, BlackBerry Desktop Manager, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, DataViz Documents To Go, Video and Music players, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, 1GB of extendable memory and a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording.
The Bold weighs 136 grams, measures 114 x 66 x 15 millimeters and comes with a 1500 mAh battery said to offer a talk-time of up to 5 hours or a stand-by time of up to 310 hours.
All in all, BlackBerry Bold will be soon available for more than 150 million possible customers (since Airtel, Reliance and Vodafone have 62, 46 and 45 million subscribers respectively). Sure, only a tiny part of them can afford RIM's new and high-end smartphone, but this doesn't mean the Canadian manufacturer won't make a lot of money after the Bold is released in India.