Blackberry Goes Globetrotting

Research In Motion announced this week that the new Blackberry 8830 will be carried by both Sprint and Verizon starting in May. Aimed at today’s jet-hopping, borderless business traveler, the 8830 will be able to retrieve e-mail in 62 countries and receive voice coverage in 157 countries. Gearlog has the details on how it accomplishes this feat:

(It) supports both CDMA (the network type that Verizon and Sprint currently use and is used primarily in the United States) and GSM, (the network type that the majority of cellular networks in the rest of the world use), which will allow 8830 users to travel freely from country to country and still be able to use Blackberry services like push e-mail, Web browsing, and more. The device will use Verizon and Sprint’s CDMA EVDO for high-speed data transfer and Web surfing, but if an 8830 user should ever travel to Europe, for example, the device reportedly will switch to GSM in order to make calls and send and receive data.

Other features include a full QWERTY keyboard, capability of playing music and video files, and Bluetooth connectivity. For more details on the differences between the Verizon and Sprint plans, check out this article at PC Magazine.

~Agen G.N. Schmitz, Amazon Current