The Pearl Flip is RIM’s first clamshell BlackBerry smartphone, combining a modern form-factor with the company’s legendary messaging capabilities. The Pearl Flip has the backlit SureType QWERTY keyboard of other Pearl handsets, together with the intuitive trackball navigation.
A standard 3.5mm headphone socket makes the Pearl Flip ideal for music, or alternatively its support of the Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP stereo profile means wireless headphones can be used. For video use, turn the Pearl Flip on its side and you can use the 240 x 320 display in horizontal orientation.
Just because the Pearl Flip is a new design direction, it doesn’t mean RIM have forgotten the feature set that makes their BlackBerry range so popular. The Pearl Flip has WiFi b/g together with quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE cellular data support for the 950/900/1800/1900MHz bands, meaning it will work in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Battery life for the Pearl Flip is rated at 14 days standby or 4 hours talktime, and the 128MB of internal memory can be added to with a microSD card.
Preinstalled software on the Pearl Flip includes wireless email, organizer, web browser, BlackBerry Maps, video recording from the integrated camera and SMS/MMS messaging. The Pearl Flip dimensions are 3.98 inches by 1.97 inches by 0.69 inches, and it weighs 3.6oz.
The BlackBerry Pearl Flip will be available worldwide this fall. T-Mobile will be the first US carrier to support the Pearl Flip, at the beginning of the fall, though they have not revealed how much the Pearl Flip costs.