Airtel, RIM Intro the BlackBerry Pearl

Airtel, along with Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry, has launched the BlackBerry Pearl in India.

The BlackBerry Pearl, which is claimed to be one of the smallest and lightest smart phones in the world, delivers the powerful BlackBerry experience together with an array of new features in an incredibly small and stylish design.

The BlackBerry Pearl features best-in-class technology and is incredibly easy-to-use. It has support for phone, email, text messaging, organizer, web browsing, and other mobile applications, as well as a digital camera, media player, and an expandable memory slot for the first time.

On this occasion, Sanjay Kapoor, Joint President of Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel, said, "The BlackBerry Pearl delivers exceptional mobile and data experience, and further endorses Airtel and RIM s ongoing commitment to the Indian market. With the BlackBerry Pearl, business meets lifestyle in a compact, sleek, and trendy handset, which defines the Airtel BlackBerry user."

Adding to it, Norm Lo, Vice President for Asia Pacific, RIM, said, "We are very pleased to work together with Airtel to bring one of the smallest and lightest smart phones in the world to mobile customers in India. The innovative BlackBerry Pearl brings the power of the end-to-end BlackBerry solution, and the convenience of a full-featured smart phone together in a small, sleek, and stylish design."

The BlackBerry Pearl has a 1.3-megapixel camera with built-in flash, 5x digital zoom, 64MB of flash memory, Speaker Independent Voice Recognition for Voice Activated Dialing (VAD), support for polyphonic, MP3, and MIDI ring tones, and intuitive call management features such as smart dialing, conference calling, speed dialing, and call forwarding.

It is quad-band and EDGE-enabled, and supports expandable memory through a microSD card slot, giving users plenty more storage capacity for music, pictures, videos, and data files.

The other key features include a speakerphone, Bluetooth 2.0 for use with hands-free headsets, a media player, stereo headset jack, and RIM s popular SureType keyboard technology. It is also supported on BlackBerry Internet Service for individuals and smaller businesses, as well as BlackBerry Enterprise Server for corporate use.

Meanwhile, the BlackBerry Pearl is priced at Rs 24,999 and is expected to be available from Airtel later this month.