Research in Motion aims to stay a step ahead of competition with three new BlackBerrys.
WITH do-everything wonderphones like the iPhone and the G1 “Google phone” breathing down its neck, the BlackBerry’s status as the best-selling smartphone isn’t guaranteed forever. So this fall, Research in Motion is introducing three radically different BlackBerry models, running all of them up the flagpole at once to see who salutes.

First, there’s the $150 BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, the first folding clamshell BlackBerry. Second, there’s the $300 BlackBerry Bold 9000, a luxury-tinged design statement that screams, “Apple isn’t the only one who can do gorgeous!” Finally, there’s the BlackBerry Storm, the first BlackBerry with a touch screen. That last phone isn’t ready for review yet; evidently, that Storm is still brewing. But the Flip and the Bold are here—and they’re very, very nice indeed.

Both phones feature new software, loaded with useful programs and white line-drawing icons against a jet-black background. As on the BlackBerry Pearl and the Curve, you navigate by turning a tiny, clickable trackball.

As usual, the strength of these BlackBerrys is e-mail. The new software offers fully formatted e-mail—fonts, bold, italic and so on—and pictures embedded right in the message. Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments open right up, ready for simple edits.

Since these are BlackBerrys, they have physical, illuminated thumb keyboards. A hundred ingenious shortcuts save you time. The much-improved web browser is still not as nice as the iPhone’s; you can’t rotate the screen for ease in reading wide columns, for example. And there’s no touch screen, so you can’t pinch or spread your fingertips to zoom in and out. Instead, web pages appear in miniature; you click the trackball to zoom in. It works well enough.

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