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RIM takes old Bold, adds touch, NFC and speed boost to create the Bold 9790

It's starting to getting crowded here

RIM takes old Bold, adds touch, NFC and speed boost to create the Bold 9790
By Jonathan Morris
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Blackberry

RIM has proven there's still life in the 97xx series, by introducing another new Bold model that will be a little cheaper than the flagship Bold 9900. It will begin shipping in a matter of weeks.

The Bold 9790 fits inside the same shell used by the 9700 and 9780 models, but just about everything inside has been upgraded.

There's now a touchscreen display, BlackBerry 7 OS (with a number of improvements to things like the web browser) and NFC support, along with 8GB of internal storage with a card slot to allow up to 32GB more. The processor has also been given a boost to 1GHz.

Visually, the Bold 9790 doesn't look a great deal different to its predecessors, with the exception of the keys sitting alongside the optical trackpad.

Although initially released in black, it's fair to say that other colours won't be far behind.

Jonathan Morris
Jonathan Morris
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From starting out as a games tester for Mastertronic, Virgin and Sega in the late 1980s, it may seem odd to then ditch everything to write about mobile phones that, at the time, lasted 20 minutes between charges. He always had a hunch mobiles would become quite popular, but possibly didn't realise how powerful (and, ironically, returning to 20 minutes between charges). Jonathan's job is to continue advising on the best hardware to buy, in order to enjoy games that have advanced considerably since those long days and nights testing Double Dragon on the C64.