Bold 9000 to go on Sale November 4

AT&T will start selling RIM's Bold 9000 in the US Nov. 4. This new flagship BlackBerry model was initially expected in the summer, but as RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis suggested in San Francisco, the Bold was still being tested by AT&T, and the carrier was being extra careful with network problems after widely publicized problems with Apple Inc.'s latest iPhone 3G. Apparently, if too many 3G users got on the network at once, it slowed considerably. Also 3G signals do not appear to penetrate buildings as well as 2G.

The Bold 9000 did launch in Canada and some overseas markets, but not in the the US, and the apparent delay has been partly blamed for the recent decline in RIM shares.

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The Bold features a HVGA (480 x 320 pixels) resolution display, 1 GB of internal memory into, a microSD card slot for up to 16 GB of extra memory, tri-band HSDPA and quad-band EDGE, 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth and GPS. Other features include a 2 megapixel camera with 5x digital zoom, improved QWERTY keyboard with thin metal strips between each row and a 3.5mm headphone jack. All this running on a 624MHz StrongARM processor with full MMX, the fastest CPU that can be found on a handset.

Curve Most Popular Handset in Stores

Avian Research polls 100 service reps at retail stores of the four major US wireless providers.

This September the BlackBerry Curve continued holding down the top spot, helped by a promotion at Sprint Nextel stores that priced the smartphone at $100. Apple's iPhone outperformed the BlackBerry and all other smartphones in the US during the summer.

Five of the top 10 devices are smartphones and four are equipped with a touchscreen.

RIM Blackberry Curve 26.1%
Apple iPhone 9.2%
LG Dare 7.9%
RIM Blackberry Pearl 6.6%
LG Voyager 6.5%
Samsung Instinct 5.8%
LG Rumor 5%
LG Shine 3.5%
Palm Centro 2.9%
Nokia 5310 2.5%

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Overall, Motorola Inc.’s Razr V3 remains the top-selling handset in the US, according to recent data from NPD Group.

Smartphones hold three of the top five slots, with Apple Inc.’s iPhone 3G at No. 2 and Research In Motion Ltd.’s Blackberry Curve at No. 3 and Pearl at No. 5. LG Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Chocolate rounds out the top-five list at No. 4.

How the Storm Was Named

David George-Cosh reports in the Financial Post on "The Story Behind the BlackBerry Storm's Name".

Rogers 2009 Offerings

The Boy Genius reports the following BB lineup for 2009 from Canadian provider Rogers:
* Q1 - The BlackBerry Curve 8900
* Q2 - A BlackBerry Storm variant
* Q3 - The BlackBerry 9220 "Magnum" (Curve 8900 with 3G)
* Q4 - The BlackBerry 9900 "Pluto" (Bold with a touch screen)