14 DAY TRIAL // Although everyone was expecting RIM's latest high-end smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold 9000, to be first released in Canada (via Rogers), the handset made its debut "a bit" more to the South, in Chile, via Movistar.
Thus, Chilean mobile users are the first people in the world to buy the new BlackBerry (only with a contract agreement, for the moment). The price set by Movistar for the smartphone is a bit surprising, and not in a good way: with a contract for two years, the Bold costs 299,900 Pesos, the equivalent of around 587 USD or 378 Euros.
There are no details about the way Movistar managed to get the Bold ahead of other American operators like the above-mentioned Rogers or US's AT&T, but the device is on sale as of today on the South American carrier's website, found at this address.
Coming in a stylish case which measures 114 x 66 x 14 millimeters, BlackBerry Bold is undoubtedly the most advanced device to come from Research in Motion. Its highlights are: quad-band GSM and tri-band HSDPA connectivity, Wi-Fi, internal GPS, BackBerry Maps, full HTML browser, email and Instant Messaging, a 480 x 320 pixels TFT display, trackball navigation, a full QWERTY keyboard, Music and Video players, a 3.5mm headset jack, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, document viewer, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording, 1GB of built-in memory and microSD/microSDHC card support for up to 32GB.
We don't know for the moment where the BlackBerry Bold will be available next, after Chile, but Canada, RIM's home country, should get the smartphone anytime soon - probably before the second half of August. Well, I'm sure Canadian users are eagerly waiting for the event.
Owned by Telefonica, one of the world's giant mobile operators, Movistar has about 6.5 million subscribers in Chile, being the country's first carrier, ahead of Entel (5.8 million users) and Claro (2.7 million users).