Research In Motion (RIM) finally unveiled its new smartphone on Monday, dubbed the BlackBerry Bold, and the company set up a booth at its annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) in Orlando, Fla., so attendees like myself could check out the new wares. Of all the 100 or so exhibits set up throughout the conference hall and the vendors' solutions showcase, no line was longer than the one in front of the Bold display.

BlackBerry Bold with Red Battery Cover

Luckily, I didn't have to wait in any lines to get my hands on the Bold. Just about every RIM representative at the show had the new device, especially the PR folks, and one of them was nice enough to let me get some alone time with it in the press room. (Thanks Tenille!)

I've been writing about RIM's next-gen BlackBerry for months—rumors, first images, early reviews of a Bold mysteriously obtained from eBay—and it seems only fitting that I collect my initial impressions of the device in this post, along with some interesting details I got from RIM staffers and even the company' co-CEO Mike Lazaridis himself. So here goes.

Initial Impressions: Love at First Sight

The first thing I noticed when looking at the Bold is its vivid and crisp display. The 480 x 320 pixel (half VGA resolution) screen is simply beautiful, especially when viewing images or watching video. According to RIM, the name Bold came from the initial reactions early viewers had when shown the device. As in, "Wow! That's bold." And it is.

Secondly, the new keyboard design is very impressive. I've used a number of Pearl, Curve and 8800 devices, and the keyboard on the Bold is, in my opinion, easily the best of all. RIM has really done something great here. It looks very much like the 8800 keyboard but feels more like the Curve because of the space you feel between keys. RIM also told me that the keyboard design was inspired by the frets on a guitar's neck, with small upraised edges on the keys to provide more tactile feedback and let you know where one key ends and the other begins.

Also, the Bold is fast. Real fast. It's by far the speediest smartphone I've ever used, with its 3G data connection and 624-Mhz StrongARM processor with full MXX (multimedia extensions). Web pages load in seconds and applications, even large ones like the media player and video recorder, open with little or no delay at all—a vast improvement over current BlackBerry devices.

Finally, the one spec that really caught my eye—in addition to the 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) support, of course—is the 1GB of onboard device memory with 128MB of flash and a microSD slot for external memory. That's a significant increase over earlier BlackBerry devices, and that amount of internal memory could be particularly valuable to CIOs and IT departments who need to store lots of sensitive data on their devices but don't want that information to make its way to memory cards, which can be easily misplaced or stolen.

Overall, I had only two complaints about the Bold: The device is a bit larger than I would've liked—it's slightly bigger than the 8800, which is by no means small--and the fact that RIM didn't give me one on the spot.

Accessories and Pricing

Another perk of hanging out in the WES press room: Access to accessories not available in the Bold display room or anywhere else for that matter. I'm talking about the colored rear

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