Hands-on with RIM's BlackBerry Bold 9900

The BlackBerry Bold 9900's has upgraded hardware, a hefty allocation of RAM and the performance of its GPU, but ZDNet UK's sister site ZDNet Australia takes a moment to enjoy the beauty of the new handset at Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry World in Orlando, Florida.

From the front, the new Bold 9900 looks much the same as the BlackBerry Bold 9780.

The official word from RIM is that this is the "best keyboard on a BlackBerry phone ever". But then, they would say that. We like that it seems slightly wider than recent Bolds, but we'll need to do a full review before we sing its praises.

In case you forget the name of your new smartphone, RIM has plastered it in huge letters across the back, cleverly remembering to position it so that it won't be obscured when you're on a call.

You can also see the 9900's 5-megapixel camera lens and LED flash.

The 9900 will be the first BlackBerry to run on BlackBerry OS 7, and you can see some of the new iconography in this image. The latest BlackBerry OS brings a raft of cool new features, with improved universal search and voice-to-text searching as two of the enhancements.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Hands on: BlackBerry Bold 9900 on ZDNet Australia.