RIM Flips with New UMA-enabled Pearl

Yes, the new RIM Blackberry Pearl (8220) is the first flip phone for the company, and continues their tradition of UMA and Wi-Fi.

The US market is famously fickled for flip phones. RIM is addressing the need.

For those of us who weren’t there, RIM co-CEO and friend of UMA Today Jim Balsillie had a keynote presentation at yesterday’s CTIA event in San Francisco. The good people at Crackberry.com covered it with a ‘real time blog’.

The presentation shows RIM really stepping up the push into the consumer market. While RIM has 54% of the US smartphone market, consumers now account for 34% of RIM’s customer base. There was a slide on the ‘four screens’, which oddly enough includes a reference to the fixed line home phone.

The list of consumer/entertainment features on the device is staggering:

-Email (of course)
-IM (MSN, Yahoo, Google, AIM, Lotus,…)
-Social networking (Facebook, myspace, quickr,…)
-Photo Sharing (flickr,...)
-Content relationships (MLB.com, NFL.com, …)
-Streaming audio (Slacker,...)
-Home media synch with iTunes, Windows Media
-Tivo controls and media playback

and the list goes on.

Below is a video clip from Crackberry.com introducing the Pearl. Very cool.

The phone will be exclusive to T-Mobile starting this fall. We can’t wait.