Vodafone today revealed the price plans for the much-anticipated BlackBerry Storm device that will enter the market just in time for Christmas. The device will come with mobile TV and music downloads included.
The new BlackBerry will be the first clickable, touchscreen phone purposely built for Vodafone, and will feature easy access to social networking sites, turn-by-turn satellite navigation, as well as music and video players.
Vodafone said this afternoon that the new device will be available via four initial price plans, with a number of free options on three of those plans.
Under the Perfect Choice Access 100 plan, the Storm handset will retail for €109.99 and will cost €49.99 a month as part of a bundle that will include 100 minutes, 100 texts, 1GB of BlackBerry email, mobile TV and 10 full-track music downloads.
Under the Perfect Choice Access 200 plan, the Storm handset will retail for €64.99 and will cost €64.99 a month as part of a bundle that will include 200 minutes, 200 texts, 1GB of BlackBerry email, mobile TV and 10 full-track music downloads.
Under the Perfect Choice Access 400 plan, the Storm handset will retail for €69.99 and will cost €84.99 a month as part of a bundle that will include 400 minutes, 400 texts, 1GB of BlackBerry email, mobile TV and 10 full-track music downloads.
And under the Perfect Choice Access 600 plan, the Storm handset will retail for €49.99 and will cost €99.99 a month as part of a bundle that will include 600 minutes, 600 texts, 1GB of BlackBerry email, mobile TV and 10 full-track music downloads.
According to Vodafone, a number of free options for calls, texts and landline minutes will accompany the Perfect Choice Access 200, 400 and 600 price plans, whereby purchasers can choose between 100, 200 and 400 calls and texts or 100, 200 and 400 landline minutes respectively.
Additional call charges that will be applied to the pricing plans if users go beyond their package allocation will range between 18 cent and 30 cent, 11 cent per text message, €2 per megabyte of BlackBerry email and 2 cent per kilobyte of Vodafone Live.
The new smart phone is the fruit of a long-term strategic alliance between Vodafone and BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion (RIM), and will be available exclusively on Vodafone’s 3G networks in Ireland, the UK, mainland Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand from next month.
The new BlackBerry Storm smart phone comes with a browser which delivers a browsing experience with desktop-style depiction in either portrait or landscape view. The new user interface combines the familiar dedicated ‘menu’ and ‘escape’ keys common to BlackBerry smart phones, but adds support for multi-touches, taps and slides, allowing the user to easily highlight, scroll, pan and zoom, making navigation fast, easy and intuitive.
The 3.25-inch screen gives users a variety of different sense experiences. Despite its flat surface, users feel the sensation of actually pressing down on virtual keys, which also light up when touched. This makes it quick and easy to type texts and emails, as well as navigate through the phone’s functions. Customers will also have the choice of using a full QWERTY, SureType or multi-tap keyboard.
More space has been dedicated to the high-resolution colour screen, allowing customers to display multimedia content and comfortably view attachments, as well as read and edit documents.
The screen, described by Vodafone as ‘ground-breaking’, with its 480 x 360 pixel resolution display, switches from portrait mode to landscape mode as the handset is rotated, while automatically changing the format of the keyboard from multi-tap or RIM’s SureType to full QWERTY.
By John Kennedy
Pictured: the BlackBerry Storm in music mode
