SAN FRANCISCO — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. introduced a new flip-style phone as it heads into the critical fourth-quarter holiday shopping season, a moved geared to solidify the company’s rapidly growing prominence in a U.S. wireless market enamored with the clamshell form factor.
Indeed, last year J.D. Power and Associates reported that nearly 70% of phones sold in the United States were clamshells, a number that surely drove RIM – a company that has long favored the slab – to invest in the development of a flipping BlackBerry.
The new BlackBerry flipper, dubbed the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 smartphone, also stands as an effort by RIM to cash in on the rapidly growing popularity of its line of gadgets; the company’s U.S. market share has gone from 4% in the first quarter of this year to a staggering 11% in the second, according to data from Strategy Analytics.
RIM’s new BlackBerry features quad-band EDGE network support and a range of multimedia functions. The phone’s keyboard sports RIM’s SureType setup, which places two letters per key.
The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 smartphone will be available from wireless carriers around the world beginning “this fall,” the company said. Specific availability and pricing details will be announced at a later date, the company said.
