New Blackberry Bold Smartphone: New Tool for Sales

If you’re in the market for a new smartphone for business, the Blackberry Bold may be just the tool you need.

When you’re finally able to get it, that is. It’ll be a few more weeks until this smartphone will start appearing in North American stores.

A few things will make this smartphone an interesting choice for sales professionals and small business owners.

First off, the Blackberry Bold is the first Blackberry to support the high-speed 3G network which will make accessing the internet from your mobile phone faster than before.

Then, there’s a brand new screen with twice the resolution of current Blackberry devices and identical (resolution, not size) to the iPhone. Screen height is identical to the Blackberry Curve you may own or have seen, but slightly wider. Overall, it’s bright and vibrant – a huge step forward. 

Another feature that could be important for mobile professionals is that the Blackberry Bold supports HTML email. That means that you can finally read newsletters or other correspondence that include images and formatting. The new Blackberry also comes with DocumentsToGo loaded, a tool that lets you edit Microsoft Office files on your smartphone.

Additional features include addition built-in GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, more memory and a new 2 megapixel camera you can also use as a business tool.

The Blackberry Bold offers the well-known keyboard for data-entry and I love it since I’ve never been able to get anywhere close to the Blackberry typing speed and accuracy on an iPhone. If you are a touchscreen fan, however, it might be good to know that Blackberry also announced the Thunder, which comes with that feature and is said to become available later this year.

Blackberry claims the Bold will offer up to 5 hour talk time and 13 days stand-by, but I’d take that with a grain of salt – especially if you plan on making extensive use of web-browsing  and Wi-Fi features. Specifications show that with 4.48″/114mm in lenght and 4.8oz/136g in weight, the device is slightly larger and heavier than the popular Blackberry Curve but pretty much identical to the iPhone.

So far, the phone has only hit the market in Germany, Chili and Canada and is expected to become available in the US by September 15. In the US, the Blackberry Bold will initially become available through AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon following later.

Like the iPhone, it won’t be cheap – but I feel Blackberry is still the best smartphone for business. For a closer look and more features, check out the Blackberry Bold site.