14 DAY TRIAL // Bell Canada has just added the long awaited Blackberry Style 9670 clamshell smartphone to its offering. The device can be purchased for as low as $49.95 with a 3-year contract. Customers who want to avoid being tied to a contract can buy the smartphone unlocked for $399.95. The carrier throws in an additional promotion that offers its GPS Navigator service for only $50 with unlimited access for lifetime.
Currently, the smartphone is available in the U.S. from Sprint, but also from Telus in Canada where it is sold for $79.99 with a 3-year contract.
However, while Telus offers both Steel Grey and Royal Purple color schemes, Bell is only retailing the Steel Gray version.
The stylish CDMA clamshell runs on the latest RIM mobile platform, Blackberry 6.0. It comes with a TFT display with 65K colors support and 360 x 400 pixels resolution, as well as secondary external QVGA screen.
The phone measures 175.5 x 60 x 18.5 mm and weighs 131g (battery included) and features touch-sensitive optical trackpad, as well as full QWERTY keyboard.
Other key features of the smartphone include: Rev. A connectivity (up to 3.1 Mbps), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, 3.5 mm audio jack, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support, 512 MB internal memory, microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 16GB, 8GB included) and GPS with A-GPS support (Blackberry maps).
Blackberry Style 9670 sports a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging, image stabilization, as well as video recording capabilities (VGA).
In terms of software, the smartphone comes with RIM's full email and messaging suite including Push Email, Instant Messaging and Document editor (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF).
The Li-Ion 1150 mAh is rated by the manufacturer for up to 264 hours of standby time or up to 4 hours and 30 minutes of talk time.