RIM Introduces The New BlackBerry 7130 Series And Enhanced BlackBerry Services For Individuals And Small Businesses In Hong Kong

Published 29th June 2006

Hong Kong - 29 June 2006
Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today introduced the BlackBerry® 7130 Series™, a sleek and stylish BlackBerry handset in a mobile phone design, and announced enhancements of BlackBerry services for individuals and small businesses in Hong Kong.

Featuring popular BlackBerry functionalities and a wide range of third-party business and personalised applications in the market, the new BlackBerry 7130 Series provides wireless access to email, phone, organiser, Internet and corporate data and personalised applications.

The quad-band BlackBerry 7130 Series, which supports GPRS and EDGE networks, comes with a powerful Intel® processor and 64 MB of flash memory that boosts performance of viewing attachments and graphics, browsing the Internet and running corporate or personalised applications.
The bright and high-resolution colour LCD screen features intelligent light sensing technology which optimises screen and keyboard lighting levels automatically for indoor, outdoor and dark environments.
The BlackBerry 7130 Series also comes with superior voice capabilities in sleek and lightweight design, includes dedicated 'send', 'end' and 'mute' phone keys, smart dialling, conference calling, speed dial, call forwarding, speakerphone and Bluetooth® support for wireless headsets and car kits.
In addition, the BlackBerry 7130 Series incorporates RIM's SureType™ keyboard technology, which merges a phone keypad with a familiar QWERTY keyboard to allow a narrower design and enable users to quickly and accurately type messages without needing to learn a new keyboard layout.

"The new BlackBerry 7130 Series is a strong addition to the BlackBerry portfolio in Hong Kong," said Norm Lo, Vice President of Asia Pacific at RIM. "With wireless email, phone, browser, instant messaging and quad-band support, BlackBerry 7130 Series is a mobile users' all-in-one mobile solution. The innovative device lets people choose how to stay in touch and keeps mobile users in the loop, even on the move."

Enhancements of BlackBerry Services to Individuals and Small businesses
The launch of BlackBerry 7130 Series accompanies the introduction of an upgrade to BlackBerry Internet Service™ bringing enhanced BlackBerry services to individuals and small businesses.

The latest offering of BlackBerry Internet Service, which allows users to access up to ten corporate and personal email accounts (including Microsoft® Exchange, IBM Lotus® Domino® and most popular ISP email accounts) from a single device, provides users with enhanced wireless synchronisation of read, sent and deleted items from the user’s BlackBerry handset to their email account.

With the upgraded version of BlackBerry Internet Service, adding new email accounts is quicker and easier, and users can select unique "sent from" addresses, auto-signatures, filters and friendly names. In addition, BlackBerry Internet Service supports the viewing of popular email attachment formats including JPEG, BMP, TIFF, Microsoft® Word, Excel and PowerPoint Corel™ WordPerfect and Adobe® PDF.

Instant messaging applications are now available on BlackBerry. With free downloads of clients of Yahoo! ® Messenger and Google Talk™* on the BlackBerry platform from RIM, users can now enjoy many features familiar with the desktop versions of the messaging applications, including contact list management, presence awareness and notifications. BlackBerry Messenger, a peer-to-peer instant messaging application on the BlackBerry platform, also comes with all new devices.

Third Party Applications
A large and growing ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) has developed a variety of applications for BlackBerry in areas including entertainment, games, ringtones and personalisation. In addition, for corporate customers with BlackBerry Enterprise Server™, third-party mobile business solutions are available for sales force automation, field service automation, network and systems management, and much more.

*Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk clients require BlackBerry devices with 16MB built-in memory with a colour screen (BlackBerry 7100 Series™, BlackBerry 7200 Series™, and BlackBerry 8700 Series™), and OS v3.6.0 or higher.