Blackberry Bold 9790 goes up for pre-order

CANADIAN PHONE MAKER Research in Motion's (RIM) Blackberry Bold 9790 smartphone is available to pre-order at online retailers.

This latest handset offering from RIM is available for pre-order online with a price tag of around £340. Online retailer Expansys will offer it first on 18 January on a SIM free basis, followed closely by Clove on 20 January.

Phones 4U also has the Blackberry Bold 9790 available for pre-order on different tariffs with a delivery date of 30 January. Its rival The Carphone Warehouse has just a pre-registration web page.

A longer wait is in store for you if you head to Amazon, which quotes an availability date of 14 February. If you want to go direct to the mobile operators then you'll have to wait, as the handset is still sitting on the coming soon web pages of O2, Orange and Three.

RIM announced the Blackberry Bold 9790 smartphone along with the Blackberry Curve 9380 back in November, when it said the pair would be released within the "coming weeks". The Blackberry Curve 9380 is already available for around £275.

The Blackberry Bold 9790 adheres to the typical Blackberry style with a 2.45in touchscreen and a Qwerty keyboard. It's powered by a 1GHz processor and comes with 768MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage.

Compared to another one of RIM's latest handsets, the Blackberry Bold 9900, the Blackberry Bold 9790 is around £120 less expensive. Users will get the bonus of an operating system update to version 7.1, which the firm announced this week at the consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas. µ