BlackBerry announced that the BlackBerry Bold 9650 will be sold in the United States
beginning in May at Sprint May 23.
Update 5/31: The launch date at Verizon of the BlackBerry Bold 9650 is expected online
June 3 and in stores June 10.
The BlackBerry Bold 9650 is considered an update to the BlackBerry Tour and at one point was going to be named the BlackBerry Tour2, there were rumors of an earlier launch but it was pulled for improvements. We suspected that it would be announced at WES and today at WES it was officially revealed.
The BlackBerry Bold 9650 has a QWERTY keyboard, 512 Flash memory which is double previous model, microSDHC (expandable to 32 Gb, 2 gigabytes included) 3.2 Megapixel camera, 3.5 mm audio jack, 480 x 360 245ppi display, Bluetooth, GPS, voice dialing, and speaker phone. The model has a keyboard similar to the BlackBerry Tour 9630 with the trackball replaced by a trackpad.
The BlackBerry Bold 9650 supports CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A networks and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS networks making it world phone that can be used in many countries.
The BlackBerry Bold 9650 comes with BlackBerry Media Sync for
syncing photos, iTunes and Windows Media Player. It looks like it has
built-in asy mobile access to Facebook, MySpace and Flickr and IM.
The BlackBerry Bold 9650 has a full HTML web browser thatcan
streaming audio and video via RTSP. It will upgradable to the new
WebKit Browser and BlackBerry OS 6.0 later this year.
Sprint will offer the BlackBerry Bold 9650 on Sunday, May
23, for $199.99 with a new two-year contract, with a
$100 mail-in rebate. There is no price or date set for Verizon yet.
We’re hoping it is included in the famous Verizon
buy One Get One Free BlackBerry promotion. Don’t forget to use the Instant
Phone Rebate Only Available with Online Purchase coupon-link to
avoid waiting for a rebate.