AT&T announced the BlackBerry Bold will go on sale November 4. Initially the model was supposed to launch in summer, but despite overseas launches, had yet to be released on U.S. soil.

It seems odd that a carrier would announce the phone’s sale instead of, say, the actual phone maker. Full details are already up on AT&T’s site in a press release. But that’s the U.S. market for you where phone makers are often held hostage to the whims of operators. In October, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said the Bold was still being tested. Perhaps the company was being extra careful after the less than smooth iPhone launch. The retail price? $299 with a retail contract.

For the curious, the full specifications of the Bold 9000 can be found on the RIM website. A similar model to it would be Nokia’s business class E71 with a QWERTY keyboard not to mention Wi-Fi, 3G and HSDPA. An added bonus is GPS functionality. As far as featuresets go, the BlackBerry Bold isn’t bold as much as it’s a practical business person’s phone.

The delay of the model did come at a cost to RIM’s shares, denting them over the summer. With the iPhone muscling into the enterprise space, RIM can’t afford to yield much ground to Apple among the business users. So what’s RIM going to do as a response? Come up with its own app store. The store is only officially launching in March 2009 but signups for developers open in December.

RIM’s app store will give developers an 80 percent cut of the revenue earned from their apps. For consumers, expect to see PayPal used as a means to buy apps direct from your BlackBerries. The question is how bold will RIM be in protecting a market segment they previously cornered?

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 pm under Cell phones.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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