14 DAY TRIAL // While North America is still waiting for it, RIM's latest high-end smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold 9000, is being released in more and more non-American countries. The latest market to get the Bold is Turkey, the Eurasian country that has a population of slightly over 70 million.
RIM has launched the Bold via Turkcell, the largest Turkish mobile operator, making it available for about 35 million subscribers. Of course, not all of Turkcell's customers are into BlackBerries and not everyone can afford to buy an expensive handset, but still, the Bold might see big sales across Turkey.
Presented by RIM and Turkcell as a "must-have for both business professionals and power users", BlackBerry Bold 9000 seems to be one of the best smartphones of this year. Moreover, the handset is also good-looking, coming with a glossy finish and a chromed frame.
The features of BlackBerry Bold include: a full QWERTY keyboard for easy text input, trackball navigation, quad-band GSM and tri-band HSDPA connectivity, a 480 x 320 pixels display with high image quality, Wi-Fi, full HTML browser, internal GPS, BlackBerry Maps, email and Instant Messaging, document viewer and editor, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, Music and Video players, a 3.5mm headset jack, 1GB of built-in memory, microSD/microSDHC card support and a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording.
Measuring 114 x 66 x 15 millimeters and weighing 136 grams, the new BlackBerry packs a 1,500 mAh battery said to last up to five hours in talk-time mode or up to 310 hours in stand-by mode.
The prices of BlackBery Bold for Turkey were not announced by RIM. We do know, however, that the smarpthone can be acquired together with a Turkcell contract agreement for 18 months and an unlimited Internet plan of 99 YTL per month (about 57 Euros or 83.5 USD).