Major UK Operators Grab BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900

Vodafone, O2 and Three have announced they will carry RIM’s forthcoming smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900, as soon as it hits the UK sometime this summer.

The announcement followed Research In Motion (RIM)’s recent unveiling of its latest smartphones at the BlackBerry World congress in Florida. The models include the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and the BlackBerry Bold 9930, both known as the BlackBerry Bold Touch.

Vodafone has already put up a registration page on its site for customers who want latest updates on RIM’s flagship handset. Its release date and pricing details are yet to be announced. However, reports have it that the smartphone will hit store shelves sometime this summer.

The thinnest BlackBerry phone

Hailed as “the thinnest BlackBerry smartphone yet,” the Bold Touch 9900 is said to be just 10.5mm thick. Its 2.8-inch, VGA (640 x 480) capacitive touchscreen offers “fluid liquid graphics” and allows users to swipe, pinch and zoom “with ease and accuracy”.

Its full qwerty keyboard – whose keys are larger than those on the BlackBerry Bold 9780 – also promises an easy typing.

According to the Canadian manufacturer, its flagship Bold Touch will boast the latest version of the BlackBerry operating system, BlackBerry 7 OS, offering “powerful, high fidelity browsing, separate personal-life and work-life content, voice enabled searches, plus additional personal and productivity apps.”

NFC on the Bold Touch

Installed with the latest BlackBerry OS is the Near Field Communications (NFC) technology for mobile payments. It refers to a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology used in payment systems such as London Transport’s Oyster card.

Earlier this year, Stephen Bates, managing director of RIM in the UK, announced that NFC will be enabled in “virtually all” of its upcoming mobile products, including tablets.

The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 also contains a powerful 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor, 8GB of onboard memory that is expandable to 32GB with a microSD card, and a five-megapixel camera capable of shooting 720-pixel HD video.