There's a New Pearl in Town - BlackBerry 8220

The first RIM smartphone to come with a flip design, known until now as BlackBerry KickStart, will in fact be released under the official name of BlackBerry Pearl 8220. Therefore, the upcoming clamshell smartphone will be the fifth device from the Pearl series, which is currently comprised of the following models: BlackBerry 8100, BlackBerry 8110, BlackBerry 8120 and BlackBerry 8130.

Research In Motion has not yet fully presented the new Pearl but, according to CrackBerry, the new smarpthone will be on sale in Canada starting mid-September, offered by Rogers. The price of the ex-KickStart is currently not known, but its' rumored to be of around $50 with a contract agreement. This would make the Pearl 8220 one of the most affordable smartphones ever, even more affordable than Palm's Centro, which has been sold until now in over 2 million units.

If we're to believe a leaked fact sheet with the BlackBerry Pearl 8220, its target is represented by the following categories of users: "young urbanites", "multi-tasking women" and "mobile men". As for the features of the flip smartphone, these are not too different from the ones found in the other Pearl handsets.

Of course, being a clamshell, the new 8220 brings an external display, said to have 160 x 128 pixels and to quickly show incoming calls, messages and so on. Other than that, the handset should pack a 240 x 320 pixels internal display, a SureType QWERTY keyboard, quad-band GSM connectivity (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) with GPRS and EDGE, Wi-Fi, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording, Media player, Bluetooth (probably 2.0 with A2DP), a 3.5mm headset jack, HTML browser, advanced email capabilities, embedded games and 80MB of internal memory, expandable via a microSD or microSDHC card.

Besides being launched in Canada, the Pearl 8220 will also get a US release, at about the same time, via T-Mobile.