RIM has announced the BlackBerry Bold, the electronics manufacturer’s first 3G device.

The BlackBerry Bold has already been released in Austria and Germany, with releases in the India, Canada and America in the near future.

RIM has dominated the business user market for a long time with models like the BlackBerry Curve and others, whilst Apple’s iPhone began to threaten this domination with the first model.  Now that a cheap iPhone 3G has been introduced to the market with all the business capabilities of the BlackBerry alternatives, RIM has had to take steps to try and cement its position in the market.

The new BlackBerry Bold offers all the features you would expect from a top-end business phone, plus a 2MP camera with video recording facilities unlike the iPhone 3G, an mp3 player and the essential GPS and Wi-Fi.

One major difference between the two competitors’ models is the choice of keyboard.  The cheaper iPhone 3G has the less-favoured touch-screen keyboard, which many have acknowledged is more of a drag to use when writing any lengthy passages.  The new BlackBerry Bold however, has opted for a Chiclet-style Qwerty keyboard which will always be popular with the hardcore users.

RIM’s deal with Microsoft to incorporate MSN Messenger and Hotmail into the phone will also see it become more popular with the non-business users who are becoming ever more well connected.

Despite the clear cross overs in the markets, 451 Group’s analyst Tony Rizzo forecasted that RIM is likely to have more sucess in the general market than Apple’s iPhone will have in the business market.

“RIM is no longer a mobile office e-mail player. It has evolved into a deeply embedded enterprise vendor, and we continue to push this as the key differentiator.  So, while Apple, Nokia, Motorola and now HTC Corp. continue to compete on enterprise hardware designs, they cannot stack up to RIM in terms of the enterprise ecosystems RIM has in place.

“This remains a crucial difference that will make competition here almost meaningless.

“The battle for higher-end consumers has escalated significantly. The next iPhone will boast 3G and may get out the door before the Bold, but it will be quite interesting to see how the Bold does as a prosumer device.  Our view remains that RIM and Apple are ‘market-complementary’ and that each will continue to find its own set of users.”

Leave a Reply