Blackberry Bold’s coming here, but is it too late?

BlackBerry phones are cool. How they handle email is still the best in the market. BlackBerrys have fab qwerty keyboards, an intuitive interface and excellent battery life. And that free-spinning micro trackball is just a blast. And Research In Motion’s (RIM) newest BlacBerry, Bold, is the first 3G BlackBerry (correction: actually, it is the first 3.5G BlackBerry; RIM had 3G phones before this) and the best PDA phone yet from the Canadian company.

Bold was to be my next mobile phone.

I saved up for it, but eventually got tired of waiting for it to show up in shops here. I got the Nokia E71 instead. Others have gotten the iPhone and the HTC Touch.

But at last, RIM confirmed that Bold will be in Singapore by this month.

But might its launch success be stymied because many consumers here have already had their fill of gee-whiz PDA phones in the past two months?

With the E71 and Touch making grand splashes to doting reviews here earlier, and Apple’s iPhone finally landing in Singapore last month to irrationally long queues, what kind of response will Blackberry’s first 3G phone draw when it finally lands here?

It’s a shame – well, for impatient me anyway – that Blackberry took so long to ship Bold, especially since it teased us with the announcement many months earlier.

I guess for existing BlackBerry users whose next upgrade is bound to be a BlackBerry anyway, the waiting is not such a big deal. Still, with BlackBerry seriously threatened now by the HTCs and Apples of the world, one wonders if RIM might have missed a great new user market-grab opportunity – at least in Singapore – by being a smidgeon late to the PDA phone party here.

Of course, RIM might not fret.

According to an InformationWeek article yesterday, RIM has doubled its global market share from a year ago – now owning 17.4 per cent of the worldwide market, according to research firm Gartner.