14 DAY TRIAL // Rogers Wireless will soon be offering two new mobile devices to its subscribers: HTC Shift and BlackBerry Pearl 8120. We don't know yet how soon that will be, but the Pearl is almost surely the first to be released.
Already available in the US, BlackBerry Pearl 8120 is the latest smartphone from RIM's Pearl family. The device brings features like a QWERTY keypad, a 240 x 260 pixels screen with 65K colors, Wi-Fi, quad-band GSM connectivity, a 2 Megapixel camera with video and flash, stereo Bluetooth, a 3.5mm audio jack, Media player, document viewer, HTML browser, email, Instant Messaging, miniUSB, handsfree and so on. Weighing 91 grams and measuring 107 x 50 x 14 millimeters, the new smartphone packs a 900 mAh battery that should provide up to four hours of talk-time and up to 360 hours of stand-by time.
Rogers already has two BlackBerry Pearl handsets in its offer, the old 8100 and the newer 8110, which is similar to the 8120 model, except the fact that the 8110 features GPS instead of Wi-Fi.
Unlike BlackBerry Pearl 8120, HTC Shift can't be considered a "mobile phone", as it's actually an ultra-mobile PC that measures 207 x 129 x 25 millimeters and weighs 800 grams. The device runs both Window Vista and Windows Mobile 6.0 and packs a wide range of advanced features: a 7 inches TFT touchscreen with 16 million colors, 800 x 480 pixels and handwriting recognition, a full QWERTY keyboard, tri-band GSM and quad-band HSDPA connectivity, Wi-Fi, 40 or 60 GB of internal memory, 1GB of RAM, a 800 MHz Intel processor, Bluetooth and so on.
According to MobileInCanada, Rogers will offer the HTC Shift for a retail price of 2,099 Canadian dollars. Pretty expensive, but you should know that the device's price can actually go lower, down to 1,599 CAD with a 3-year Rogers contract agreement.
