BlackBerry Thunder 9500 touchscreen smartphone should be coming soon to Verizon Wireless and Vodafone customers in the U.S. and Europe.
BlackBerry Thunder 9500 seems to become the first touchscreen smartphone in RIM's 9000 series. According to Wall Street Journal, the Canadian manufacturer will be offering the BlackBerry 9500 on Verizon Wireless and Vodafone networks, exclusively. Vodafone has a track record of getting BlackBerry smartphones exclusively in Europe, and an exclusive agreement will obviously also cause extra buzz for Verizon Wireless.
The BlackBerry Thunder 9500 is scheduled to hit store shelves in the third quarter of 2008, most likely in September. According to Wall Street Journal, the BlackBerry Thunder 9500 will ship with 3G support like the recently introduced BlackBerry Bold, but it's not currently known whether HSDPA and EV-DO versions will be released simultaneously. RIM has also worked hard to improve the battery life of its 9000 series of smartphones, which is kind of reassuring.
Just like the BlackBerry Bold, the RIM BlackBerry Thunder should come with a 624 MHz processor, which should be powerful enough to handle multitasking at least. What kind of graphical user interface the BlackBerry 9500 will be using is not yet known, but it will likely be a version of its recently introduced upgrade found in the BlackBerry Bold.
It would at least be quite a feat for RIM if they've been able to come up with two completely different user interfaces in two years, at the same time as for instance Microsoft has been working on its own Windows Mobile 7 interface.
Since the latest incarnation of RIM's platform supports document editing, the BlackBerry 9500 could end up matching heavy-weights like the AT&T Tilt. However, that really depends on how RIM has chosen to design the BlackBerry 9500. It would have been cool to see a BlackBerry 9500 with a slide-out QWERTY thumbboard and a significantly larger screen with landscape mode than the standard 2.5-inch 65K screen we are used to.
On the other hand, if the RIM BlackBerry Thunder 9500 turns out to be an all-touch smartphone coming after the iPhone, we at least hope that the Canadian manufacturer will come up with some multimedia services and a decent memory bundle too, as Verizon Wireless' Get It Now interface and "no accessories included" policy aren't exactly a true multimedia smartphone worthy. Nevertheless, since both the Curve and the Bold have a stronger multimedia focus than other recent full-QWERTY phones by RIM, we assume the BlackBerry Thunder 9500 will walk down the multimedia road some way or another.
Like the BlackBerry Bold, the RIM BlackBerry Thunder 9500 will most likely also get GPS services. According to Wall Street Journal, RIM has also been working on improving the browser experience, but we don't know whether that's specific to the BlackBerry 9500 or a comment on the recently released platform in general.
The BlackBerry Thunder 9500 will be available on Verizon Wireless and Vodafone networks in Q3 2008, and will most likely cost around $400 with a two-year contract.
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