BELLEVUE, USA: T-Mobile USA, Inc., and Research In Motion (RIM) announced the launch of BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 smartphone — the first BlackBerry flip phone — in the US.

The new BlackBerry Pearl flip smartphone maintains the popular features and benefits of the BlackBerry Pearl; plus it packs numerous enhancements into the sleek and popular flip design.

The spacious keyboard allows easy typing and dialing while the flip design helps protect the large, vibrant internal screen and provides the satisfying finality of ending a call by closing the phone. Customers will also appreciate the external display for previewing calendar reminders, e-mail, text messages and phone calls at a glance.

Leslie Grandy, vice president - product development, T-Mobile USA, said: "The flip phone remains the vastly dominant and preferred design for mobile phones in United States. Being the first company in the US to offer the unique BlackBerry experience on a flip phone is a huge benefit for T-Mobile customers."

The combination of rich multimedia capabilities and RIM's powerful mobile e-mail solution together with support for text messaging, picture messaging, enhanced web browsing and built in Wi-Fi makes the BlackBerry Pearl flip ideal for balancing a busy lifestyle by enabling customers to share pictures, check the latest sports scores or access social networking sites, including Facebook and Flickr.

Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing, Research In Motion, said: "The BlackBerry Pearl flip takes all the advanced features and refined usability that customers have come to expect from BlackBerry smartphones and makes them available in a friendly and innovative design. Whether they are sending text messages or e-mail, listening to music or simply making phone calls, customers are going to love using this phone."

In addition to the new flip design, the BlackBerry Pearl flip also provides an advanced multimedia experience through video recording and playback, a 2.0 megapixel camera with digital zoom, stereo Bluetooth support, and an easily accessible external memory card slot.

Source: Business Wire