3 Reveals Release Date for BlackBerry Bold Touch

A Bold with a touchscreen and the hardware QWERTY keyboard RIM fans love so much.

The BlackBerry Bold Touch, or BlackBerry 9900 is probably one of the most exciting phones to come out of RIM this year. Part BlackBerry Bold, part BlackBerry Storm, the touch-and-type BlackBerry Bold 9900 was revealed at BlackBerry World in May. At the time, media and expectant BlackBerry fans were told that the phone would arrive sometime during the summer. Though pricing and specific release date were not mentioned, Vodafone, 3 and O2 all revealed that they would offer the phone when launch day did arrive.

Today, 3UK spilled the beans on the release date for the newest Berry. Despite RIM saying the phone would be available this summer, it seems the phone won't hit 3 until September. When it does arrive on September 15, it will be in black only. The white model is not expected on the network until October. 3UK did not reveal pricing.

The Bold 9900 is RIM’s thinnest phone yet. It boasts a high resolution, 2.8-inch capacitive touch screen; a 1.2GHz Snapdragon CPU; 768MB of RAM; up to 32GB of storage via MicroSD (8GB as standard); a 5-megapixel camera with flash and HD video capture; microUSB; NFC; Bluetooth; 802.11a/b/g/n; and compass, accelerometer and proximity sensors. It also offers the physical keyboard avid BlackBerry users are so attached to.