The Sober BlackBerry 8820 Released in Canada

Only three days after Rogers announced the availability of Palm Centro in Canada, the largest Canadian mobile operator comes up with another new smartphone, but this time manufactured by RIM. We're talking about the BlackBerry 8820, which is already available south of the Canadian border, via both AT&T and T-Mobile.

The BlackBerry comes to Rogers in order to replace the 8800, a smartphone that exists in the carrier's line-up since last year. Design-wise, the 8820 is not quite different from the old 8800. Its novelty is the fact that it features Wi-Fi, which can be used with the Rogers Home Zone Calling service.

BlackBerry 8820 is not featured yet on the official website of Rogers, but it will probably appear in the next few days. However, we do know the prices of the handset: $549 with a contract agreement for one year, $499 with a two-year contract and only $349 for those who sign a contact for no less than three years. These prices are similar to the ones the 8800 was sold for. I say "was" because this smarpthone is currently out of stock and, what with the arrival of the new 8820, it's very likely that Rogers will not offer the old handset anymore.

Prices aside, the BlackBerry 8820 is a good smartphone for business users. Besides Wi-Fi, its features include: a 320 x 240 pixel TFT display with 65K colors, built-in GPS, BlackBerry maps, quad-band GSM connectivity with EDGE, a full QWERTY keyboard, trackball navigation, advanced email and Web capabilities, Instant Messaging, Music player, Bluetooth 2.0, document viewer, voice dialing, microSDHC card support and a battery that should last up to 5 hours in talk-time mode and up to 520 hours in stand-by mode. There's no photo camera included in the 8800, but for lots of business users this is actually a good thing.