Toronto (ON) – Research in Motion’s latest Blackberry phone, the Pearl Flip 8220 is an average phone by all accounts, with the exception that it is marketed under the Blackberry brand and offered by a company that has been the fastest growing smartphone manufacturer for some time. RIM has been carefully extending its reach from corporate into consumer markets for some time and this new device should provide the company with room for additional growth.



For the very first time, it may actually be difficult to describe the latest Blackberry phone as a smartphone. Yes, it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and supports a few advanced applications such as Instant Messaging and if you really wanted to, you could use the 8220 in a corporate environment. But in contrast to the wider Bold or Curve, the Pearl Flip is as wide as the regular Pearl and comes with RIM’s “Suretype” keypad, which is not the most convenient keyboard to write text messages or even emails.

In fact, the 8220 (available only for GSM networks initially) is closer to the mainstream than any other Blackberry device before. The manufacturer especially advertises the phone’s multimedia capabilities, which include audio and video playback. The overall feature set is aligned with the regular Blackberrys, however it lacks an integrated GPS chip that comes with the Pearl 8110 (for GSM networks) and 8130 (CDMA).

In direct comparison to the original Pearl, the clamshell phone is a bit thicker, shorter and slightly heavier. It integrates a 240x320 pixel color screen on the inside and an additional 128x160 pixel screen on the outside. The embedded flash memory has been doubled to 128 MB. The storage capacity can be increased through a separate microSD card.

We would expect the phone to be positioned right next to existing Blackberry Pearl phones in terms of price, which should make it an appealing device for customers who previously did not shop for Blackberry phones because of their initially higher price or form factor. As far as features are concerned, RIM is marching into a territory, where its sole advantage may be its Blackberry brand, since we can’t really call the 8220 an enterprise phone.

According to Gartner, RIM was the fastest growing smartphone manufacturer in the second quarter of this year.  While Nokia remains the dominant supplier in the industry, RIM is catching up. Nokia sold 15.3 million smartphones in Q2, which translates into a 47.5% market share. However, the year-over-year growth was only 8.1%. In comparison, RIM grew by 126% to 5.6 million units and a market share of 17.4%. HTC is a distant third with 1.3 million smartphones sold and a market share of 4.1%.      

The 8220 will be available later this year, RIM said.