RIM announces the Blackberry Pearl 8100

Research In Motion has officially announced their new Blackberry smartphone: the Pearl 8100. This is the smartphone that in RIM intentions should expand the company market while still retaining the previous customers.

In fact the main new feature of this smartphone is the addition of several multimedia functions. First of all the Blackberry Pearl is able to reproduce audio and video files on its 240x260 65k color display. The formats supported are MP3, AAC, MPEG-4 and h.263.

The files will have to be transferred on the device via a USB cable, Bluetooth or the Pearl improved browser and RIM included 64 MB of internal memory to store the files. If this space is not enough the Blackberry Pearl also has a slot for a microSD card.

Another new feature is the possibility to take photos thanks to a 1.3 megapixel camera. It has a built-in flash and a 5x zoom and once the picture is taken it can easily be added to an e-mail.

Speaking of e-mails naturally the Blackberry Pearl will support the push e-mail system that increased so much the diffusion of these devices in the corporate world.

Just like the previous series of RIM smartphones the 8100 does not include a touchscreen but instead the user will have at his disposal a trackball navigation system. As for the typing this model does not have a QWERTY keyboard but relies on the RIM's SureType system where each key handles two letters.

Being this a smartphone it’s also important to report the phone side of the features, right? So the Pearl 8100 is a quad-band GSM/GPRS phone that also supports the 2.5G wireless standard EDGE.

It supports Bluetooth 2.0 so it can be paired with wireless devices like headsets and headphones and offers voice dialing and voice commands.

The Blackberry Pearl 8100, will be available for T-Mobile USA in September while it will be on sale the next month in Canada (via Rogers) and in Europe.

Later this year the Pearl will also be available in Latin-American and Asia-Pacific areas. Its price has not been announced because RIM stated that every carrier will set his own price.

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