14 DAY TRIAL // The latest market where RIM's new BlackBerry Bold was confirmed for an official release is Bahrain (or the Kingdom of Bahrain), the small but rich insular country from the Middle East. The Bold will be sold via Zain, the Kuwait-based mobile operator that offers services in 22 countries from the Middle East and Africa.
BlackBerry Bold will run on Zain's high-speed HSDPA network, coming with lots of high-end features, like: internal GPS, BlackBerry Maps, a full QWERTY keyboard, a 480 x 320 pixel TFT display, Wi-Fi, full HTML browser, DataViz Documents to Go (for viewing and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents), BlackBerry Desktop Manager, BlackBerry Media Sync, support for BlackBerry Internet Service and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording, and 1GB of internal memory, expandable up to 16GB via a microSD/SDHC card.
Talking about the new RIM product, Bashar Alami, special projects manager at Zain Bahrain, stated, "The uber-sophisticated BlackBerry Bold smartphone is sure to delight Zain Bahrain customers who love to stay ahead in the tech race as well as those who value increased productivity. It delivers an amazing blend of functionality, performance, usability and design, making it an ideal choice for both business professionals and power users in Bahrain."
Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing at RIM, added, "The new BlackBerry Bold smartphone represents a tremendous step forward in business-grade smartphones and lives up to its name with incredible functionality and performance. We are very pleased to be working with Zain to deliver this breakthrough smartphone to customers in the Kingdom of Bahrain."
The exact release date of BlackBerry Bold in the Middle Eastern country was not announced, and neither was the price of the smartphone. However, Zain said that the prices are "very competitive," and important discounts will be available for users who subscribe for long-term contract agreements.