14 DAY TRIAL // At about the same time with the appearance of BlackBerry Pearl 8220 on T-Mobile USA's official website, Rogers has unveiled several upcoming release parties for the same smartphone. Thus, we know now that the 8220 will be available for Canadian customers starting October, as the first from the release parties will take place on September 23, in Toronto. Shortly after, Montreal (September 25), Vancouver (September 30) and Calgary (October 2) will follow.
Unfortunately, as stated on the new website Rogers has come up with, all the parties will accept "Rogers Representatives only," so there are little chances for regular mobile users to attend them. Anyway, it's still a good thing that the new Flip smartphone is getting closer to a launch.
Introduced by Rogers as "the BlackBerry smartphone you'll flip for," the 8220 is the first clamshell manufactured by RIM and also one of the world's few smartphones to come in this form factor.
The 8220 will bring to its future Canadian owners the following: a quite large 2.4 inch TFT display with 240 x 320 pixels, a 1.6 inch external display, SureType QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi and Rogers Talkspot, built-in GPS, Full HTML browser, advanced email capabilities, document reader and editor (DataViz), Media player with lots of formats supported, a 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording, expandable memory and so on. Unfortunately, there's no 3G connectivity, so users will have to be happy only with the GSM frequency bands (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) that support both GPRS and EDGE.
As in the case of T-Mobile's Pearl 8220, the price of BlackBerry's clamshell via Rogers is not known at the moment. Also, as I said earlier, an exact release date was not given, but October should bring the smartphone in all of Rogers' retail stores from across Canada.