BlackBerry Curve 9350, 9360 and 9370 officially announced by RIM

RIM has announced three new models, the BlackBerry Curve 9350, 9360 and 9370. While RIM did not mention the differences between the three models, based on released specs, it looks like the BlackBerry Curve 9350 is a CDMA model, the BlackBerry Curve 9360 is a GSM variant and the BlackBerry Curve 9370 is a world phone with dual-mode CDMA and GSM connectivity. RIM CEO Mike Laziridis said, "The new BlackBerry Curve smartphones are absolutely stunning and offer a significant performance upgrade with an unmatched mobile social experience for the millions of feature phone users in the market as well as our existing Curve customers."

None of the three is the BlackBerry Curve Touch model that uses a touchscreen. Instead, these three Curves use a trackpad along with the iconic BlackBerry physical QWERTY keyboard. GPS and Wi-Fi are both aboard the handsets and each of the three features a 5MP camera with flash and video capture. Of course, the new BlackBerry Curve 9850/60/70 all run the new BlackBerry 7 OS which includes RIM's second generation WebKit browser that eats up JavaScript and renders pages 40% faster than the browser on BlackBerry 6 OS.

The new Curves each have a 2.44 inch display with resolution of 360 x 480 which works out to 246 ppi. Both the Curve 9350 and 9360 have 512MB of RAM aboard which can be expanded with as much as a 32GB microSD card. The Curve 9370 also has RAM of 512MB, but comes with 1GB of storage out of the box, that can be expanded to as much as 33GB with a microSD card.

The BlackBerry Curve 9350/60/70 will all be available this month through Canadian carriers, and next month in the rest of the world. Actual launch dates and pricing for individual models from specific carriers will be announced together with RIM's partners. As we reported, some leaks have pointed to a September 14th launch of the BlackBerry Curve 9360 for T-Mobile.

source: RIM