RIM BlackBerry 8800

(First Look) - RIM yesterday launched a brand new smartphone for the professionals at 3GSM conference currently underway in Barcelona, Spain. The 8800 is RIM’s effort to make its BlackBerry handsets more multimedia friendly and purposeful than competing devices from Palm, Samsung and Nokia. As such, the 8800 now features a multimedia player with audio and video playback support, voice activated dialing (VAD), GPS and BlackBerry maps services, expandable storage option, high capacity battery and an updated design.

After the success of its more consumer friendly Pearl, RIM has adopted a similar theme across its product line, it seems. The 8800 looks strikingly similar to the Pearl with a trackball in the center, right below the 320x240 display. In addition, the newly announced BlackBerry is sleeker and thinner than any of the previous BlackBerry models that were designed for and targeted at mobile professionals. The standard backlighting and automatic lighting adjustment features, along with a QWERTY keyboard, are available as well.

Perhaps the most exciting features are the ones we mentioned above. Thankfully, you can now entertain yourself with music and video playback in your downtime, instead of having to limit yourself to more e-mails and web browsing with previous models. As always, RIM is on top of things with expandable storage via microSD card and extended battery life. As if the multimedia aspects alone weren’t enough, the 8800 has built-in support for GPS and mapping services. The device can now actually give you turn-by-turn directions without the additional GPS unit. Great! It doesn’t get any better than that.

Unfortunately, RIM is still limited to EDGE when other devices are aggressively making their move towards EV-DO, the broadband standard for mobile devices. That should’ve been a key improvement with the 8800 as well, but RIM appears to have missed the opportunity.

All in all, the RIM BlackBerry 8800 emerges out to be hands down winner just like its predecessors in our preliminary analysis. Our thoughts may change when we actually take one for a test in our labs in the near future, however. The new version of BlackBerry is expected to be available from AT&T (read: Cingular) starting February 21.

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