Sprint's getting an exclusive on a BlackBerry-- and it's the second one to reach the market with BlackBerry 6 and all of its Webkit browser goodness. The BlackBerry Style 9670 is a flip phone that packs a full QWERTY keyboard for the quintessential BlackBerry typing experience and a 5.0-MP camera. Perhaps the best news about this BlackBerry? When it becomes available on October 31st, it'll be for the nice price of $99 with the standard contract.
The Style has two screens: on the inside, a 2.7-inch 360 x 400 display; on the outside, a 2-inch display with 240 x 320 resolution. The phone itself measures a tidy 3.7 x 2.4 x 0.7 inches. It's the same width and depth of the Bold 9650, but about 0.7 inches shorter. While the interior screen will offer the standard BlackBerry interface, the external one will preview new messages, calls, music, and calendar reminders.
RIM tells us that the Style's full QWERTY is roughly about 1 millimeter or so smaller than the one on the Bold 9650, and nowhere near as small as the Pearl Flip. That's good news for physical keyboard addicts, plus the flip style protects the keyboard and will prevent accidentally sending e-mails to your boss from your pants.
It's also worth noting that the Style has 512MB of memory, 802.11b/g/n, an included 8GB microSD card and will feature visual voicemail through Sprint. Although the camera is a full 5-megapixels, video recording will happen at VGA resolution (640 x 480).
RIM and Sprint are positioning this phone as mid-range device for people who are making the transition from a messaging phone to a full-fledged smart phone and who don't want a touchscreen phone. According to Sprint, there are 100 million people still using flip phones so they see this as a good way to bring them over to the BlackBerry side with a familiar hardware style. To that end it'll be available in Steel Grey and Royal Purple (both $99) at launch.
Stay tuned for a full review, but in the meantime, check out the photos below.
