The iPhone was not the only phone that launched this week. Bell Canada announced that the BlackBerry 8830 World Edition was now available on its network. The BlackBerry 8830 World Edition from Bell is the first BlackBerry smartphone to take advantage of the world’s two leading wireless network technologies. It offers the high speed Internet access and premium North American coverage of CDMA networks in Canada, the United States and Mexico, and the global reach of GSM/GPRS technology when clients travel around the world.
The BlackBerry 8830 comes with a full QWERTY keyboard and many of the multimedia features (including support for the audio MP3, WMA, AAC and video MPEG-4, WMV, H.264 formats) that RIM first unveiled on the Pearl. It also has 64MB of memory, a trackball (like the Pearl), a microSD slot, a 2.4-inch QVGA display, voice-activated dialing, GPS and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP.
Prices for the BlackBerry 8830 World Edition range from CAD$299 with a 3 year contract to CAD$699.95 without a contract.