After numerous leaks, Research in Motion (RIM) finally announced the Blackberry 9500. It will be exclusively sold by Verizon in US, Vodafone in Europe & Telus in Canada. After the final specs were released a notable omission is the lack of Wi-fi in the Storm. That seems to be a big mistake on part of Blackberry to make an iPhone rival Touch Screen Smartphone without Wi-fi functionality. In present times, Wi-fi has become a must in High-end Smartphones & RIM's decision to not pack the 9500 with Wi-fi could hurt it in 9500's sales. Especially when Nokia has started to put Wi-fi in all of it's new N-Series & E-Series phones. In Windows Mobile world, almost all phones have Wi-fi in them. The decision is also confusing as the Blackberry 9000 Bold already has Wi-fi in it.

The Blackberry Storm 9500 will be sold through Vodafone networks and will be free on monthly plans of 35 GBP and up with an 18-month contract.The Blackberry Storm 9530 is the variant of the handset that will be sold in North America through Verizon & Telus. Along with the quad-band GSM and 2100Mhz UMTS support that the 9500 model has, it will also offer CDMA2000 1xEV-DO support. The 9500 Storm will be available for purchase soon.


Detailed Specs of Blackberry 9500 Storm :

• 3 Mega Pixel Auto Focus Camera with LED Flash
• 3.3 inch Touch Screen with resolution of 360 x 480 pixels
• True Haptics
• 3.5 mm headphone jack
• 624 Mhz CPU
• 192 MB Ram
• 3G, HSDPA & GPS
• Quad Band GSM
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Video player DivX/WMV/XviD/3gp
• Media player MP3/WMA/AAC+
• DataViz Document Viewer/Editor
• Micro SD card slot
• Blackberry Maps
• Landscape virtual QWERTY keyboard
• BlackBerry OS
• 112.5 x 62.2 x 13.9 mm