BlackBerry Bold arrives with Wi-Fi, GPS and HSDPA

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has announced its most powerful smartphone yet, the BlackBerry Bold - a HSDPA high-speed 3G-enabled device with built in Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS location-finding capabilities.

Finished in a smart black, chrome and leather effect design, the BlackBerry Bold is aimed at high-end professional users, with a reworked full Qwerty-keyboard and business-grade messaging and synchronisation applications. It features a large bright half-VGA (480x320 pixels resolution) display, and a speedy 624MHz mobile processor to facilitate high speed web browsing, downloading and streaming.

The usual spread of BlackBerry messaging and organiser functionality is present, including push email support with attachment viewing, and document editing for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files using DataViz Documents to Go software.

The Bold is naturally geared up to work with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server messaging solution for corporate users, BlackBerry Professional Software for small businesses, plus the BlackBerry Internet Service for personal email services and BlackBerry Unite! software for small business and home users.

The BlackBerry Bold employs the familiar mouse-style trackball control for menu navigation and browsing, with an improved browser offering a full web version of pages as well as mobile optimised versions.

As well as tri-band HSDPA, the BlackBerry Bold supports 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi connectivity. It has a GPS receiver inside and comes with the BlackBerry Maps sat nav application loaded. Other compatible sat nav software packages can be used as an alternative.

Multimedia features include a 2-megapixel camera with video recording capability, plus a multi-format music player that can sync with iTunes on a PC. The device has 1GB of onboard storage plus 128MB of flash memory, and supports MicroSD/SDHC high capacity memory card expansion.

The BlackBerry Bold 9000 is expected to debut in the UK in June. Price details have yet to be confirmed.