Has it really been more than a year since Research in Motion launched a 3G capable handset?
BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has finally announced a successor to its wildly popular BlackBerry Bold 9000, increasing the product number to 9700, but trimming the fat across all of the handset's physical dimensions. The 9700 is like the old Bold after a week at a Boot Camp for fat kids, now 5mm shorter across its width and length and 19 grams lighter.
But these are the only areas where the numbers have gone down, across all other specifications we see the numbers travelling in the opposite direction. The old Bold shipped with a 480x320-pixel display, 1GB of storage and a 2-megapixel camera, the 9700 ships with a 480x360-pixel display, a 2GB microSD card and a 3.15-megapixel camera.
The other big change is the shift from a jogball for navigation to an optical touchpad, like the one we saw on the 8520, which should, if nothing else, assist with web browsing, though we're keen to see if it also improves our high score on Brick Breaker.
For all these enhancements RIM still thinks it can squeeze better battery life out of the new model too, with six hours talk time (up an hour on the iPhone 3GS) and about 17 days standby time. It's certainly not in the same league as the four or five days we used to get on old BlackBerrys, but its not too shabby all the same.
The Bold 9700 should hit stores in the UK in November, though there's no word yet about when we might see the 9700 down under.
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