The people over at Pinstack have been all over this rumor for the last few days.
Will there be a WiFi enabled 8800 Blackberry coming out soon? Apparently so.
It seems that the good folks at RIM have been talking about this for a while and we at CrackBerry are pretty confident the new Wi-Fi enabled 8820 will be coming out in the summer.
“For some of us BlackBerry users, news of a WiFi 88xx BlackBerry is always more than welcome. Although, the 8800 stacked against the 8700 features a ton of new features even without Wifi. However, for me it willl take WiFi to pull me away from my 8700g.” says Pinstack’s Editor. “This will greatly enhance my away-from-desk but within office building productivity. Especially when using Remote Desktop, VNC, Telnet and SSH applications that I currently use over GPRS. Also here in Antigua we have island wide WiFi service where I can pull over and log on to the WiFi service with 75% island coverage.
When using Idokorro's Remote Desktop for servers and Telneting to routers that I maintain it will be a dream. Not to mention when traveling; being able to work via WiFi Hotspots will be a huge plus for Network Engineers and IT Techs. Most 8700 users won't need WiFi and so you can pick up the 8800 next week and it will be a great upgrade.
For the record, the 8800 originally should have launched WITH WiFi but RIM ran into issues with this feature and so there will be two launches. The first 8800 (w/o WiFi) and the 8820 (w/ WiFi).
The expected dates for the 8820 release being May/June 07' hopefully sooner and esp before the launch of Apple's iPhone. Although, in fact they shouldn't be compared but in actuality the iPhone does affect RIM's stock. Possibly less in future as the corporate world begins to learn the different Market targets of both devices.
Attached is a comparison chart of the 8820 against the 8700. So far, the only additional feature over the 8800 is WiFi.”
