Last night, Verizon accidentally posted a demo video of the upcoming BlackBerry Bold 9930, running through the basic highlights. Although it’s not one of the unannounced BlackBerry smartphones that we’re expecting to break cover today, it’s good to see some U.S. carriers lining up to sell this thing. Though the video doesn’t really show anything new, you can spot a few performance snags, including a slow load time for App World icons, and the all-too-familiar hourglass at one point. The demo closes with some awkward phrasing that suggests that the 9930 runs on Verizon’s new LTE network, but if you squint, you can see it’s running on plain ol’ EV-DO 1X.
The BlackBerry Bold 9930 will be identical to its GSM counterpart in all respects, except for the antennae. It’ll have a new 2.8-inch 640 x 480 touchscreen, 1.2 GHz processor, 768 MB of RAM, and some new goodies, like a near-field communications chip, a magnetic compass, and Wi-Fi mobile hotspot capabilities. Though the software is largely unchanged from OS 6, there are a few new tricks, like voice-activated universal search, and there’s a whole new Liquid Graphics rendering engine which takes full advantage of the device’s added horsepower. Check out our hands-on video for a closer look.
RIM is likely to announce multiple devices today, and one of the likely candidates, the Torch 9850, is probably coming to Verizon too. The Torch 9810 might also get announced today, though it’s hard to tell if Verizon’s going to pick that one up too. In any case, there are new versions of Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger and Foursquare apps expected to be launching today along with the new devices. I’m pretty excited for the new Bold, but it’ll be an uphill battle against the many high-powered dual-core devices avaiable from the competition. Show of hands, who’s holding out for the 9930 on Verizon?
[via CB]