BlackBerry holding company Research In Motion (RIM) and Vodacom have launched the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone in South Africa.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is the thinnest BlackBerry smartphone yet, measuring in at a mere 10.5 mm thick, which is just 1.2 mm thicker (115 x 66 x 10.5 mm, 130 g) than the iPhone 4. The device is a touch-and-type device, coupling RIM’s high performance and familiar Bold keyboard with a 2.8" (640 x 480, 287 ppi) Transmissive TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen.

Also onboard is Wi-Fi 802.11 n, 3G HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, GPS with aGPS support, 768 MB RAM, as well as 8 GB of internal storage that can be boosted to 40 GB, with the use of a microSD memory card. The Bold 9900 sports a 5 MP camera with face detection, image stabilisation and LED flash, which can record HD-Ready (720p) videos.

All round faster performance

The new Bold promises to be no slow-poke thanks to it being powered by an 1.2 GHz QC 8655 processor, while operating RIM’s new BlackBerry 7 OS, which introduces the company’s next generation BlackBerry browser with a significantly faster browsing speeds. According to RIM these speeds are up to 40% faster than BlackBerry 6-running smartphones and up to 100% faster than BlackBerry 5-powered smartphones.

Liquid Graphics technology is also included, combining a dedicated high-performance graphics processor with a speedy CPU and VGA resolution display, to deliver a highly responsive touch interface. The latter is noticeably quicker than that of BlackBerry 6-operating smartphones, the likes of the BlackBerry Torch 9800.

RIM’s new BlackBerry Bold 9900 is also the first BlackBerry smartphone to include built-in support for NFC (near field communications), a new technology enabling many new capabilities such as pairing the smartphone with NFC-enabled accessories and reading SmartPoster tags with a simple tap of the smartphone.

Zunaid Dinath, Vodacom’s managing executive for sales, said:“We are excited to bring the first BlackBerry 7-based smartphone to our customers in South Africa in the form of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 which will provide our customers a rich and integrated communications experience”.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is available from participating Vodacom outlets as of today (7 September 2011) at a recommended retail price for the R7694 on prepaid and on Vodacom’s BlackBerry Talk 100 package at R449/month over 24 months.  

In related news RIM also recently announced that its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is now also available to local SMEs and large corporations via Telkom Business Mobile (TBM).