BlackBerry announced the 9720 in August and said that the device would be available in September. The 9720 will be available to customers starting September 14 for Rs. 15,990. The smartphone doesn’t run on BlackBerry’s latest OS, BB10 but runs on the older BB OS 7.1. The 9720 is targeted primarily at Asia, EMEA and Latin American markets. The device will be available in Black, Blue, Pink, Purple and White colours.
In its design, the smartphone is very reminiscent of the Curve series of smartphones from BlackBerry. The 9720 runs on the BB OS 7.1 and has a 2.8-inch touchscreen display with an HVGA resolution. The smartphone shows off a QWERTY keypad as well. A 1450mAh battery powers the smartphone which the company claims will last for up to 7 hours of talk time and 432 hours of standby time. Under the hood, it has an 800MHz CPU with 512MB RAM.
It also has a mere 512MB built-in storage but that can be expanded to 32GB via a microSD card. These specifications seem really outdated since we have a slew of smartphones that boast of better specifications at the same price point.
Commenting on the launch, Sunil Lalvani, Managing Director for India, BlackBerry said, “The new BlackBerry 9720 smartphone builds on the incredible success of the BlackBerry 7 OS. This new smartphone is absolutely stunning and provides an ideal choice for urban youth and customers who are looking to upgrade from a feature phone or existing BlackBerry Curve smartphone to an affordable, easy-to-use smartphone with rich messaging and social networking connectivity.”
The Q&A session at the Mumbai launch event saw Mr. Advait Vaidya, Head Product Management categorically state that there will be no bundled mapping solution available on the smartphone. “We find that consumers in this category don’t view it as a critically essential feature,” he said.
Speaking of features, this particular flavour of the BlackBerry OS 7 has a couple of tweaks that are exclusive to the 9720 as of now. Multicast is one example. It lets you type a message and post it simultaneously to multiple social media steams such as Twitter, Facebook and of course BBM.
The same applies to pictures that you take from the camera. Another feature that was much talked about was something called Share FM. The feature simply lets you set the name of the station that you’re currently listening to as your BBM status. If you’ll notice these are all minor feature upgrades but hey better late than never, we figure.
(with inputs from Siddharth Parwatay)