Mobile Phones Blog

What the Flip? The first BlackBerry flip phone

October 14th, 2008 by Thomas

Wow. Here at mobile phones, we thought that the flip phone/clamshell handset format was a dying breed, here in the UK at least. Turns out that the US-based branch of T-Mobile have been working closely with Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM), on the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 smartphone.

The Pearl Flip is currently only available in America, which explains a lot – as Leslie Grandy, Vice President of Product Development for T-Mobile in the US says; “the flip phone remains the vastly dominant and preferred design for mobile phones in the United States. Being the first company in the US to offer the unique BlackBerry experience on a flip phone is a huge benefit for T-Mobile customers.”

That’s us told then. Despite the fact that this many never see the light of day in Europe (flip phones don’t tend to sell so well over here), it’s worth mentioning that the Quad-Band Pearl Flip comes with full Wi-Fi support, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash, digital zoom and video recording capabilities, and stereo Bluetooth. The 128MB of onboard memory is boosted by the 256MB microSD card which comes supplied as standard, although you can expand the performance of the Flip Pearl with cards up to a whopping 16GB in size.

This news comes just as RIM prepare to launch their much-talked about Bold and Storm BlackBerry handsets in a joint effort to re-establish their position on top of the businessphone pile and to give the other smartphone manufacturers some food for thought. The iPhone 3G and the Omnia in particular have been threatening to steal away some of RIM’s primary customer base with their well integrated mobile email features.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 3:25 pm and is filed under BlackBerry, Samsung, T-Mobile, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.