Last week, a leaked Sprint flyer indicated a $249 price-point for the BlackBerry Bold 9930. Though Sprint’s iteration likely won’t land for another week or so (August 21), Verizon is ready to release its BlackBerry Bold flagship to the world, starting today. Just like at Sprint, the handset will cost $249 with a two-year agreement.
This new device is certainly a step up from its predecessors. BlackBerry 7 OS seriously improves ease-of-use and navigation in some fundamental ways, and also brings a new level of fluidity to the UI. On the other hand, there are still a couple key features missing from the OS. But you can tell that RIM is stepping up its game, which makes us that more excited to get a peek at the first QNX smartphones from RIM.
In terms of specs, this touch-and-text BlackBerry sports a capacitive 2.8-inch 640×480 touchscreen, with a QWERTY keyboard down below in true BlackBerry fashion. On the back, you’ll find a 5-megapixel camera capable of video capture in 720p, and a single-core 1.2 GHz processor sits under the hood.
As it stands now, RIM is a bit behind competitors in terms of hardware. While we’re seeing plenty of dual- and multi-core processing chips and 8-megapixel cameras capable of 1080p or even 3D video capture, RIM is still releasing a single-core handset with a 5-megapixel camera. We hope that the Canadian phone maker can get a dual-core processor into its first QNX handset, but the company has expressed concern over time constraints so there’s no telling what kind of specs to expect come Q1 2012.