my next phone: the Blackberry Bold Touch 9930 aka Montana

Blackberry Bold Touch 9930 (Montana)
RIM just made it official – the 9900/9930 will be released this summer. It’s a Blackberry Bold with a touch screen, so we get the best blackberry keyboard, the latest blackberry OS, and touch goodness in one package. Assuming it comes to Sprint, I will be grabbing this as soon as my current contract expires in June. And if it skips Sprint and goes to Verizon, I will follow. This is the King of Bberry, with a quad-band radio so I can continue to use it abroad. There’s no other device for worldwide travel that comes even close. My recent trips to India were with unlimited data and otehr friends picked up local BIS SIM cards to get unlimited voice. Meanwhile, my poor friends with iPhones were paying rapacious fees to AT&T for roaming on the megabyte. This alone is reason enough that I’ll never go iPhone, and that’s before you put the crack addiction of BBM into play.

In related news, RIM also announced video chat and a true Facebook app for their PlayBook tablet. The IPad still doesn’t have a native Facebook app, I should note. I think that a Playbook+Montana combo is a real synergy winner here.

Here’s the promo video of the 9900/9930 from RIM:

and a hands-on video via Crackberry.com –