by Dieter Bohn on 5/2/2011 | Filed Under: News; Tags: blackberry, competition, BlackBerry Bold, treo 600 | 22 comments
Sister-site CrackBerry.com is live on the ground at BlackBerry world this week, where RIM has dropped a slew of news, including:
- Announcing the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Bold 9930, two versions of the same BlackBerry that offers a full QWERTY physical keyboard beneath a touchscreen
- Video Chat for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet was also announced
- BlackBerry Balance, which is a way for corporate-secured BlackBerrys to still have a place to install consumer applications and act like a consumer phone.
- An update to Facebook for BlackBerry
- Some other enterprise-y bits.
The touchscreen BlackBerry Bold is the most interesting bit. It's not BlackBerry's first phone to marry a touchscreen and a physical keyboard (that would be the Pre-alike Torch), but it does mark some kind of historic occassion for longtime Palm fans: It only took RIM 8 years to release a device that matches the core feature set of Handspring's Treo 600. Nailed it!
We kid, we kid. The new Bold has a wicked fast processor and BlackBerry OS 7, which probably could have been called 6.2, but we already got our dig in above so we'll give 'em that.
In any case, keep it locked to CrackBerry for all the news coming out of BlackBerry world this week.