Blackberry Unveils Its First Flip Phone

Blackberry has announced the release of its fist flip phone.  Dubbed the “Blackberry pearl Flip 8820″ its features include an EDGE based mid-range phone with WiFi (b/g), Bluetooth 2.0, a SureType Qwerty keyboard and a large QVGA internal screen as well as the pre-requisite secondary external LCD making it easy to preview emails, text messages, phones calls and the like.  Voice Activated Dialling (VAD), MP3 ring tones, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint editing directly on the handset and support for BlackBerry Media Sync which let’s BlackBerry owners sync their handsets with iTunes just as if they owned one of Apple’s devices rounds out the features.

Negatives are an entry level 2MP camera, the lack of 3G and a GPS.  While storage comes via the microSD/SDHC memory expansion slot rather than from any significant native memory. Talktime is also quoted at just four hours though standby is claimed to last up to 14 days (no doubt with everything other than the phone switched off).

Which carrier will provide the phone is not yet known, but I would suspect AT&T as well as T-Mobile will be the first ones.