BlackBerry 7130g

Available June 2006
9th June 2006

The BlackBerry 7130g is the latest revision to the 7100 series of messaging devices, initially exclusive to O2 in Europe, but likely to be picked up by other operators too.

It follows the same basic layout of the 7100x, with the now-familiar SureType keypad underneath a large, bright display. In terms of size and weight, the BlackBerry 7130g is almost identical to the older 7100 series devices.

The 7130g is powered by a 312MHz Intel Xscale processor, the same as found in the BlackBerry 8700 series. Internal memory now consists of 64Mb of Flash memory flus 16Mb SDRAM, a significant improvement over the 32Mb and 4Mb in the older 7100x. The battery life has been improved too - the BlackBerry 7130g has a whopping 18 days standby time (up from 8 days) and four hours talktime. Although the standby time is impressive, the talktime is a little disappointing for a business handsets.. in our view, four hours is not enough.

One of the things that set the original 7100 series apart from other handsets was the display - one of the brightest and clearest screens on any device on the market. The 7130g comes with basically the same panel, a 240x260 pixel unit in 65,000 colours. On top of that, the BlackBerry 7130g comes with Bluetooth, and a built-in speakerphone. As with the 7100, this is a quad band GSM device, but it now supported EDGE and well as GPRS (where available). There's no camera, expandable memory or MP3 player (although the 7130g does support MP3 ringtones) which is great for corporate customers.

Of course, this is a BlackBerry device, so its main strengths are in messaging. It supports standard Internet POP3/IMAP4/SMTP email as well as "Push" email from a BlackBerry server (which can be integrated with a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino server). It also supports a variety of instant messaging protocols (support may vary by operator).

The BlackBerry 7130g should be available in the UK from June 2006 onwards, presumably followed by O2 Germany shortly afterwards.

 Subscribe to our newsletter for more news on upcoming releases