Following up this morning's official BlackBerry Bold 9650 announcement and our guided video tour of the Bold 9650 and Pearl 3G, we spent a few more minutes with the new CDMA Bold stacking it up against its two brothers the Bold 9650 and Tour 9630.
While the BlackBerry Tour brand has been given the axe and is now a member of the Bold family, the feel of the new Bold 9650 is obviously more Tour 9630 than Bold 9700 (or 9000). If you have held or own the Tour, in your hand the device feels almost identical, the exception being the center navigation area, where the Bold 9650's optical trackpad replaces the Tour 9630's trackball. Considering that a lot of Tour owners suffered issues early on with their trackballs, this change is most welcomed one. While you can't see the WiFi, it's now there, but for some reason this new flagship device is lacking the 802.11 n (it does have b and g) that the Pearl 3G has received. Maybe they ran out of room for n attena with all of the 9650's World Phone goodness in there.
As we reported on the other day, the BlackBerry Bold 9650 doubles up in device memory from the now standard 256MB to 512MB - a first for a BlackBerry Smartphone. The jump up in memory provides more room for apps and should handle OS 6.0 and the WebKit browser well when they get rolled out later this year. And as with the Storm2 and Curve 8530, the Bold 9650 gets OpenGL support for 3D graphics, something no other BlackBerry Bold or GSM BlackBerry device for that matter has.
Be sure to take a look at the video above... Adam did the recording on this one and left a little surprise at the very end for y'all. We'll be doing more in-depth reviews on the 9650 once we get to spend some real with it.
