Blackberry Bold Launch From Celcom

Updated on 2nd September 2008 4pm!

Pix1: (L-R) Mr. Harith Iskander; En Farid Yunus, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Services, Celcom (Malaysia) Berhad; Mr. Dany Bolduc, Regional Director, Asia Pacific, RIM; Dato’ Sri Shazalli Ramly, Chief Executive Officer, Celcom (Malaysia) Berhad; and Mr. Darryl Prince, Carrier Relationship & Sales Manager, Vodafone Business Unit, RIM; with the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone.

Celcom (Malaysia) Berhad and Research In Motion (RIM) today officially introduced the BlackBerry® Bold™ smartphone in Malaysia. Crafted from premium materials inside and out, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone is the first BlackBerry® smartphone to support tri-band HSDPA high-speed networks around the world, providing superior functionality and performance for business professionals and power users.

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone integrates 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi® and GPS, which can pinpoint the user's location and supports location-based applications and services. It comes with a beautiful half-VGA (480x320 resolution at 217 ppi) color LCD that is fused to the undersurface of the lens, making images and videos appear in stunning definition and clarity. The smartphone also comes with rich multimedia capabilities including a media player for music, videos and photos and a 2 megapixel camera with video recording.

“The addition of the BlackBerry Bold smartphone gives Celcom one of the most attractive BlackBerry smartphone portfolios in the industry,” said Dato’ Sri Shazalli Ramly, Chief Executive Officer of Celcom (Malaysia) Berhad. “Customers will be attracted to the BlackBerry Bold smartphone’s robust features, stylish design, and rich multimedia and productivity capabilities. This helps Celcom customers get the most out of our network, one of the fastest, widest, clearest and best networks in Malaysia.”

“The BlackBerry Bold smartphone provides BlackBerry customers with unprecedented display quality, speed, power and functionality for both professional and personal use in a stylish design that exudes confidence. We are very pleased to be working with Celcom to bring this breakthrough smartphone to customers in Malaysia,” said Dany Bolduc, Regional Director, Asia Pacific, Research In Motion.

Outstanding performance with superb phone features
Powering its robust communications and multimedia capabilities, including phone, email, messaging, organizer, browser, camera and media player, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone comes with a next-generation 624 MHz mobile processor, 128 MB Flash memory plus 1 GB on-board storage memory, and a microSD/SDHC memory card slot* that is conveniently accessible from a side door. DataViz® Documents to Go® is also preloaded, enabling users to edit Microsoft® Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the smartphone.

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone also features a new acoustic design that increases the size of the phone’s audio sweet spot, improving listening quality and clarity. It comes with support for hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits (including car kits that adhere to the Bluetooth Remote SIM Access Profile) and other Bluetooth peripherals, noise cancellation technology that offsets background noise, a powerful speaker phone and support for polyphonic, mp3 and MIDI ring tones.

Robust email and messaging
The BlackBerry Bold smartphone works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, which enables advanced security and IT administration within IBM® Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft® Exchange and Novell® GroupWise® environments, as well as BlackBerry® Professional Software for small businesses. It also works with BlackBerry® Internet Service, which gives users access to up to 10 supported work or personal email accounts (including most popular ISP email accounts).

Rich multimedia functionality with desktop-style web pages
The BlackBerry Bold smarpthone features a 2 megapixel camera with video recording capability and an enhanced media player that can display pictures and slideshows quickly, play movies smoothly in full screen mode, and manage an entire music collection. Audio can be played over the handset’s dual speakers in rich, stereo sound, and when using headphones or external speakers, the media player gives the user an equalizer with 11 preset filters – like "Lounge", "Jazz" and "Hip Hop" – that boost or soften audio ranges to create the perfect ambiance.

Managing music, pictures and video is made easy with the inclusion of Roxio® Media Manager for BlackBerry® as well as Roxio Photosuite® 9 LE in the BlackBerry® Desktop Manager software. Users can enhance pictures and create photo albums on the computer. For users that manage their collection with iTunes®, the new BlackBerry® Media Sync application provides a simple way to sync iTunes digital music collections with the smartphone**.

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone also comes with a newly enhanced, high performance browser, giving users an on-the-go web browsing experience with desktop-style depiction. The trackball mimics a mouse, making it easy to navigate sites in "Page View" or "Column View" or to zoom in on specific parts of a web page, while various emulation settings allow users to choose between the full desktop-style HTML content and layout or the mobile version.

In conjunction with the launch of the BlackBerry Bold smartphone, Celcom also introduced its new Celcom PowerTools Mobile Email Plans, which will allow customers to access their corporate and personal email accounts from as low as RM38 a month. For BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers, there are three options for light, medium, and heavy email users, and additional plans for those who deploy BlackBerry® Professional Software and/or BlackBerry® Enterprise Server within their company.

“Our customers demand instant and reliable connectivity as well as seamless communication, which is why we have introduced such flexible mobile email solutions. Customers will recoup the cost in a day from the time and travel saved by having email at their fingertips, and the corresponding increase in productivity and efficiency,” Dato’ Sri Shazalli added.

Availability

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone is scheduled to be available for Celcom customers in Malaysia in the third week of September 2008, retailing at RM2,499 (with Celcom PowerTools Mobile Email Plans).