Research In Motion (RIM) has joined hands with CDMA operators MTS, Tata Docomo and RCom to launch a BlackBerry 7 OS smartphone — the Curve 9350, in India on December 1.
Talking to The Mobile Indian, Krishnadeep Baruah, director of marketing for India at RIM, said, “BlackBerry 7 OS based smartphone Curve 9350 will be available to Indian users from December 1, bundled with MTS, Tata Docomo and RCom connections.”
He further added, “The three operators will come out with special data plans for Curve 9350 when they launch it.”
Meanwhile, an RCom spokesperson told The Mobile Indian, “We are still working on the exclusive tariff plans which will be available to Curve 9350 users, but in the last couple of months we have been quite aggressive on pocket friendly data plans and will continue on that path.”
In the past, RCom had come out with an impressive bundled plan and even offered handsets virtually for free if subscribers agreed to use a particular tariff plan for a particular time period. We can expect the same offering been given to RCom’s Curve 9350 users.
Meanwhile, though MTS has confirmed the availability of Curve 9350 on its network, its spokesperson did not disclose the launch date and tariff plans for the smartphone.
It will be interesting to see if MTS adopts the same strategy it adopted for launching Android based HTC Pulse bundled with its connection where its subscribers didn’t need to pay upfront; instead they just needed to sign up for a monthly rental plan of Rs 1,500 per month with a commitment of 12 months to get the device.
In turn they got 1500 minutes of Talk time along with 1500 free SMSes and free data usage of 1500 MB every month for twelve months.
Inspite of repeated attempts, Tata Docomo spokesperson was not available for comment.
The BlackBerry Curve 9350 is the first CDMA-based BlackBerry 7 smartphone to be launched in India. It is ergonomically designed with a comfortable and iconic keyboard for fast, accurate typing, and has an optical trackpad for easy, one-handed navigation.
On the connectivity front, it has GPS and WiFi support. It also has a 5 megapixel camera with flash and video recording which can directly be shared on social networks. Curve 9350 has an internal memory of 512 MB and supports up to 32 GB memory cards for additional media storage.
BlackBerry Curve 9350 includes built-in support for Augmented Reality where users can use the Wikitude application to find nearby BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) contacts in real-time, read reviews on restaurants close to them, or get the story behind an interesting landmark or point of interest. The phone has NFC which enables users to pair accessories or read SmartPoster tags with a simple tap of the smartphone.