BlackBerry Bold 9900 in the flesh!

I managed to get a sneak peak and got a few shots of the upcoming BlackBerry Bold 9900 yesterday. It’s not yet out in South East Asia and they would not tell exactly when it will be released so this is just some sort of a media preview.

The device looks pretty impressive both inside and out. It still has that BlackBerry design signature but no more of the thick, clunky form factor — it’s relatively thin at 10.5mm.

It’s still a bit awkward when you have a full qwerty and a touchscreen paired with each other but looks like that’s the direction nowadays (the Nokia E6 also has the same).

There’s not much real-world NFC applications available but we were able to test it out yesterday and worked as expected. The specs in itself is already impressive.

BlackBerry Bold 9900 specs:
• 2.8″ capacitive touch screen display (640×480), 287 dpi resolution
• QWERTY keyboard, optical trackpad
• 1.2 GHz processor
• 768 MB RAM
• 8GB on-board memory,
• microSD slot supporting up to 32GB
• NFC technology
• 5MP camera w/ 720p HD video recording
• Orientation Sensor (Accelerometer), Digital Compass (Magnetometer), Proximity Sensor
• GPS with aGPS support
• Dual-Band WiFi – 802.11 b/g/n @ 2.4 GHz and 802.11 a/n @ 5GHz
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• 1230 mAh Li-Ion battery
• BlackBerry 7 OS

The Bold 9900 is also the first handset from RIM to sport the new BlackBerry 7 OS. It’s interesting since RIM has also released BB 6 OS last year, giving the BB 7 OS a quick turn-around.