Blackberry 9900

Today RIM announced two new BlackBerry QWERTY bars to join the Bold lineup - the Touch 9900 and Touch 9930. Both smartphones feature 2.8-inch VGA touchscreens and run on the newly announced BlackBerry OS 7

The Blackberry Blod 9900  is a GSM device with quad-band GSM and tri-band HSPA+ support (up to 14.4Mbps HSDPA). The Blackberry 9900 is a dual-band CDMA phone with support for quad-band GSM and dual-band HSPA+ global roaming.

Now that we've made clear the specs. Both phones are virtually the same inside and out. They are each powered by a 1.2GHz processor and 768MB RAM. According to some previous information the chipset we are talking about should be the Snapdragon MSM8255(GSM)/MSM8655(CDMA) with a Scorpion CPU and Adreno 205 GPU. But we guess we'll have to wait and see if that's accurate

BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900/9930

The Bold Touch duo have 2.8-inch capacitive touchscreens with a VGA resolution (that's 287 ppi density), slightly redesigned QWERTY keyboards, 5 megapixel cameras with 720p video recording, 8GB of internal storage and microSD card slots.

The connectivity package is impressive alright - there is dual-band Wi-Fi - 802.11 b/g/n at 2.4 GHz and 802.11 a/n at 5 GHz, NFC support, GPS with A-GPS and Bluetooth.

Both Bold Touches are 10.5mm slim and run on the newly announced BlackBerry OS 7 - it separates personal from corporate data, comes with an upgraded browser and HTML5 video support.

BlackBerry OS 7 browser beats iOS, Android browsers

The Blackberry OS 7 listed browser improvements as one of its major selling points. Some benchmarks from RIM show impressive results – the browser bests Mobile Safari and the Android Browser at JavaScript and page loading times.

Tests were run on the new BB Bold Touch 9900, which went head to head with the iPhone 4, Google Nexus One and Nexus S. An old BlackBerry running the BB OS6 with the old web browser was used as well.

The new browser in BB OS 7 loads pages 1.6 times faster than the one in the previous version – 7.8 seconds to load a page on average versus 12.4 seconds for the old version. Panning and zooming is much faster too, says RIM though they didn’t provide numbers for that.

The JavaScript engine, which got a JIT compiler, flew past the mobile browsers on iOS and Android. The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 ran the Sunspider benchmark in 2.84 seconds (lower is better), while an iPhone 4 passed it in 3.23s, the two Google droids posted times between 5 and 6 seconds and finally, the BlackBerry OS 6 browser did it in 10.8 seconds.

Of course, what RIM neglected to mention is that all things equal, the Bold Touch 9900 has a 20% advantage in pure clock speed – its Qualcomm CPU runs at 1.2GHz, while the rest of the competition have their run at 1GHz (and the old Berry runs at much lower speeds of course).