BlackBerry Bold goes to Taiwan with a special QWERTY keyboard for Chinese input

Taiwan Mobile and RIM Introduce the BlackBerry Bold Smartphone in Taiwan

First HSDPA BlackBerry Smartphone Aims at Professional and Power Users; Includes Hybrid QWERTY-BoPoMoFo Keyboard for Chinese Input

Taiwan Mobile (TWN) and Research In Motion (RIM) today introduced the BlackBerry® Bold™ smartphone, the first BlackBerry® smartphone to support tri-band HSDPA high-speed networks around the world. The BlackBerry Bold from Taiwan Mobile aims at business professionals and power users and comes with a hybrid QWERTY-BoPoMoFo keyboard for Chinese input.

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone includes integrated GPS, which can pinpoint the user's location to support location-based applications and services, as well as enterprise-grade Wi-Fi® (802.11 a/b/g). It has a large, bright HVGA (480x320 resolution at 217 ppi) color LCD that is fused to the undersurface of the lens, making images and videos appear in stunning definition and clarity. The smartphone is also packed with rich multimedia capabilities including a media player for music, videos and photos and a 2 megapixel camera with video recording.

“The BlackBerry Bold smartphone blends exceptional functionality and performance in a stylish design together with localized needs for the Taiwanese market. We are very excited to be working with Taiwan Mobile to introduce this breakthrough smartphone,” said Norm Lo, Vice President of Asia Pacific, Research In Motion.

Taiwan Mobile has been devoted to providing innovative products, and was first to introduce the BlackBerry smartphones and services to Taiwanese customers in 2006.

“We are glad to bring the BlackBerry Bold to Taiwan,” said George C. Chou, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Enterprise Business Group, Taiwan Mobile. “We have seen keen interest in BlackBerry smartphones. With the new BlackBerry Bold from Taiwan Mobile coming equipped with a hybrid QWERTY-BoPoMoFo keyboard – which supports the most popular Chinese input in this market – as well as GPS and Wi-Fi network support, we believe customers will enjoy great benefits and efficiency in their professional and personal life.”

Localized Chinese Support
Customers will be able to compose and read Chinese emails, browse Chinese websites and input Chinese text on their BlackBerry Bold smartphones. In addition to the BoPoMoFo input method, the BlackBerry Bold from Taiwan Mobile also supports Traditional Chinese with Jyutping and CangJie, and Simplified Chinese with Pinyin, CangJie and WuBiHua.

Outstanding performance with superb phone features
Powering its robust communications and multimedia capabilities, including phone, email, messaging, organizer, browser, camera and media player, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone comes with a next-generation 624 MHz mobile processor. It includes 128 MB Flash memory plus 1 GB on-board storage memory, as well as a hot swappable microSD/SDHC memory card slot to support up to 16GB of additional storage, which is conveniently accessible from a side door. The pre-loaded DataViz® Documents to Go® software suite enables users to edit Microsoft® Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the smartphone.

Featuring a new acoustic design that increases the size of the phone’s audio sweet spot and noise cancellation technology that offsets background noise, the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone delivers excellent listening quality and clarity. It supports hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits (including car kits that adhere to the Bluetooth Remote SIM Access Profile) and other Bluetooth peripherals. It also has a powerful speaker phone and support for polyphonic, mp3 and MIDI ring tones.

Robust email and messaging
The BlackBerry Bold smartphone works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, which enables advanced security and IT administration within IBM® Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft® Exchange and Novell® GroupWise® environments, as well as BlackBerry® Professional Software for small and medium -sized businesses. It also works with BlackBerry® Internet Service, which gives users access to up to 10 supported work or personal email accounts (including the most popular web-based and ISP email accounts).

Rich multimedia functionality with desktop-style web pages
The BlackBerry Bold smarpthone features a 2 megapixel camera with video recording and an advanced media player that can display pictures and slideshows quickly, play movies smoothly in full screen mode, and manage an entire music collection. Audio can be played over the handset’s dual speakers in rich, stereo sound, and when using wired headphones or external speakers, the media player gives the user an equalizer with 11 preset filters – like "Lounge", "Jazz" and "Hip Hop" – that boost or soften audio ranges to create the perfect ambiance.

Managing music, pictures and video is made easy with the Roxio® Media Manager for BlackBerry® as well as Roxio Photosuite® 9 LE, which come with the BlackBerry® Desktop Manager software. Users can enhance pictures and create photo albums on their computer and quickly transfer them to the handset through USB (2.0). For users that manage their collection with iTunes®, the new BlackBerry® Media Sync application provides a simple way to sync iTunes digital music collections with the smartphone*.

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone also comes with a newly enhanced, high performance browser, giving users an on-the-go web browsing experience with desktop-style depiction. The trackball mimics a mouse, making it easy to navigate sites in "Page View" or "Column View" or to zoom in on specific parts of a web page, while different emulation settings allow users to choose between desktop-style HTML content and the mobile version of web pages.

Pricing and Availability
The BlackBerry Bold smartphone is expected to be available in TWM myfone stores for corporate and individual users from the beginning of November 2008. The BlackBerry Bold smartphone is priced at NTD$21,500. For corporate users subscribing to an unlimited corporate data plan for use with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the price of the BlackBerry Bold smartphone can be as low as NTD$6,500**. For individual customers and smaller businesses who want e-mail access and web browsing with BlackBerry Internet Service, the price can be as low as NTD$11,500**.

In addition to ordinary characters and alphanumeric symbols, it also boasts Chinese characters which are depicted in orange color and located at the bottom right side of the keys.

Supported languages include Simplified Chinese with Pinyin, CangJie and WuBiHua, Traditional Chinese with Jyutping and CangJie. Perfect for Taiwanese who want to browse websites in Chinese as well as compose emails in that language. You can pick up this special Bold version for approximately $662 as a standalone handset.