What, you think we didn’t have one before today? While we’re still not sure when you’ll be able to walk into a Rogers store to actually buy the shiny new device like Simon did, today still marks the official launch of the BlackBerry Bold on Rogers. In honor of this special day, we’ve decided to post our exhaustive review, if only to whet your appetites.
And boy, has this day been a long time coming: three years in development, three months since its official announcement at WES 2008, and three times the hype of any other BlackBerry release. The first in RIM’s next generation lineup of smartphones, the BlackBerry Bold has been labeled everything from an enterprise company’s desperate push into the prosumer space to a true iPhone killer. Most of the BlackBerry faithful are just hoping that it turns out to be a worthy merger and evolution of the BlackBerry 8800 and Curve device lines. This review will settle the debate.
Be forewarned, our review of the BlackBerry Bold is fairly large. However, we’ve broken the review down into specific sections for quick and convenient access to the information you seek. Make sure to post a comment to let us know if there’s anything we’ve missed, anything else you want to know about, and whether or not you feel RIM’s new flagship device meets the hype.
Enough talk! Behold, the BlackBerry Bold.
Read the rest of The Ultimate BlackBerry Bold Review
Yet another item from the fanciful land of patent filings: the “Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Handheld Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard”. It might be thought that the whole hideaway keypad and orientation detection thing has been done, but obviously not with a trackball, otherwise this filing wouldn’t have gone through. Considering another patent of this variety has been released recently, it’s easy to get enthusiastic about the idea of a BlackBerry with significant form factor changes. For the bookish, you can check out the whole patent filing here.
Our friends at BlackBerry Cool have posted some information on a escalating war of lawyers between Motorola and RIM.
Motorola sued RIM, claiming that RIM is using 7 Motorola patents without permission. RIM sued right back with 9 claims of patent infringement, and accused Motorola of refusing to license some of their patents in a “fair and reasonable” manner.
Neither company appears to be winning so far, so we’ll just have to wait and see where this one goes.
Our friends at BlackBerry Cool noted that Palm has modified their home page and saturated newspaper everywhere with a new ad campaign that make fun of RIM for the recent outages on the BlackBerry network.
The new ads say:
Palm smartphones include voice, email, text, web, calendar and contacts.
And more importantly, uptime.
Connect to your Microsoft Exchange Server.
No third-party servers and no nationwide blackouts.
Considering their customer satisfaction levels, amongst other things, I’m not sure they’re in a position to take cheap shops.
Our friends at BlackBerry Cool got the scoop on another report that looks at the present and future of smartphones.
The report from ChangeWave shows Apple’s large lead, with 17% of mobile phone users polled saying they plan to buy an iPhone in the next six months and 16% planning on buying a BlackBerry. Motorola has continued their downward plunge, with 11% of users planning on buying one of them in the next six months compared to over 30% in July of ‘06.
Apple again topped the charts with 72% customer satisfaction, followed by RIM with 55%. Most other manufacturers hovered in the mid-30s, and Palm sat dead last with only 30% satisfaction.
Our friends over at BlackBerry Cool posted about RIM publishing a new patent for a touchscreen LTD.
The patent is called System and Method for Integrating A Touchscreen Within an LCD. It works by detecting displacement within the liquid crystal display and routing that data to software within the device. The patent was published 4 months after it was filed, in contrast to the usual 18 month gap, which could indicate that the technology will be used sooner rather than later.
This is definitely something to keep an eye on.
The gang at PalmInfocenter posted the results of a smartphone usage report by Canayls, which shows off the strong growth of smartphones in 2007.
The report compared market share between some of the bigger players in the smartphone industry. Total shipments grew almost 72% just in the 4th quarter of 2007, from 20 million units to over 35 million. RIM was the leader in growth, shipping 121% more units than in the preview quarter. Newcomer Apple shipped 2.3 million units, beating veteran player Motorola by only around 20,000 units.
Unsurprisingly, Nokia was the strong leader, shipping nearly 19 million units.
Our friends at BlackBerry Cool have posted a rumor that RIM has begun work on OS 5.0 for their BlackBerrys, and we might see the fruits of their labor before the year ends.
The news comes from Jibi, a writer with a good track-record for BlackBerry rumors and news. There’s no word on the feature set of 5.0, but given how long it’s been since OS 4.0 was released we can hope for some big jumps.