Just slightly ahead of TELUS and Bell, the BlackBerry Bold 9790 has made its North American debut on Rogers. TELUS is officially launching it tomorrow, but for those who just can’t wait (for some reason), the 9790 will cost $99.99 on a three-year contract, or $449.99 with no strings attached.
The BlackBerry 9790 is basically a smaller, less expensive version of the Bold 9900. It still has NFC and augmented reality support thanks to the magnetic compass, but dials back the touchscreen to 2.4 inches and a 480 x 360 resolution. The processor is just a smidgen slower at 1.0 GHz with 768 MB of RAM, but the overall experience is more or less what you’d expect. One thing that the Bold 9790 manages to lord over its bigger brother is camera autofocus. Our hands-on video of the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is here, and we’ll likely have a full review up in the next couple of weeks.
I’m really curious to see how well the the 9790 fares when pitted against the 9900; it’s cheaper, offers more or less the same experience, and you can actually take close-up pictures with it. To be fair, cannibalized sales is the least of RIM’s worries these days. Head on over to Rogers to get ordering.