Saudi mobile operator Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) officially launched the BlackBerry Bold 9700 Kingdomwide, Mobily said in a statement on Monday. The “9700” is the latest HSDPA enabled BlackBerry device that runs on Mobily state of the art 3.75G network. It comes with a touch sensitive trackpad and bilingual Arabic/English QWERTY keypad, a high resolution 480x360 pixels screen with support for 65K colors, all packed in a stylish chrome accented and convenient form factor measuring 10.9 cm long, 6 cm wide and 1.4 cm deep, and weighing 122 grams. Features include integrated GPS and assisted-GPS, 802.11 b/g WiFi support, a 3.2 megapixel camera with 2X zoom, a powerful multimedia player, 256 megabytes of internal memory and supporting a Micro SD card expandable up to 16 gigabytes, and Bluetooth v2.1 support. Battery life for the BlackBerry 9700 is impressive with six hours of continuous talk-time or 17 days in standby mode. The BlackBerry 9700 sells for SR2,599 at all Mobily outlets, bundled with a monthly BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) allocation of 2 gigabytes for SR99 a month for email and Internet usage, the highest monthly BlackBerry data allocation in the Kingdom. If customers manage to use more than the 2 gigabyte allocation, they pay 2 halala per kilobyte. Customers can subscribe to BlackBerry Internet Service either by sending an SMS text message with “BIS” in the body of the message to 1100 or at an outlet where they purchase the device. BlackBerry Internet Service gives customers the opportunity to send and receive emails from 10 different email accounts. Other benefits bundled with BIS include PIN messaging support. Instant messaging using PIN messenger comes bundled with the monthly BIS service and allows BlackBerry users to send virtually an unlimited volume of messages among them. One very useful feature of Blackberry messenger is that it allows communication between any blackberry handset holders anywhere in the world, adding other Blackberry friends can be done using the PIN number or email address of the contact you wish to add to your list. Support for other instant messaging clients like Windows Live messenger, GoogleTalk, Yahoo! messenger, and many more is also available. BlackBerry users can take advantage of wide variety of social media platforms and networks, as the BlackBerry platform comes with native applications for Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter using a variety of third party applications.
