iPhone bashing BlackBerry making Bold debut in Europe

Davey Winder
Friday, 08 August 2008 18:10

Your IT - Mobility

Business users do not tend to have much time for digital camera phones, with a few niche market exceptions, which probably explains why the BlackBerry Bold offers a vision of yesterday with its 2 megapixel camera, albeit with flash and digital zoom.

There is dual speaker stereo sound though, and plug in a pair of headphones to get an equaliser option as well. Roxio Media Manager for BlackBerry will come bundled with the Bold to help control all the multimedia stuff, along with Roxio Photosuite 9 LE.

RIM tell us, in a move that is sure to annoy Apple, that the Bold provides simple syncing with iTunes courtesy of the BlackBerry Media Sync application.

But, again, these are hardly business functions and it seems that RIM is trying a little too hard to compete with Apple on the consumer front. The same cannot be said of the location based service and satnav functionality provided by the integrated GPS.

In the UK the Bold specs include a business-worthy 1GB of storage on-board, with the option of adding more via a microSD slot. Up to 8GB more currently.

It seems that Research in Motion, far from just introducing another level of BlackBerry for its business users to keep them from biting into Apple, has responded to the iPhone 3G launch by changing tack a little.

It seems that with this new BlackBerry it is actually targeting the consumer market and with it potential iPhone 3G users as well. A Bold move indeed...