BlackBerry Bold 9900 now on pre-order at Vodafone

Vodafone now has the BlackBerry Bold 9900, the new handset which carries OS 7, up for pre-order on its website.

When this Bold model was announced back in May, it was with a summer release in mind, although that had seemed to slip to September – until Play.com tagged it with a mid-August release date back at the start of last month.

And it seems Play.com wasn’t wrong, because Vodafone has declared the delivery date for those who pre-order the handset now will be August 16th. The company says it will “aim” to deliver for then, mind, so that isn’t a cast iron guarantee, but it would seem the middle of the month is on the cards.

The 9900 is a slim profile device with a 2.8 inch display, which is compact to make room for the Qwerty keyboard underneath in traditional BlackBerry fashion.

A 1.2GHz processor is the engine, backed up with 8GB of storage (with microSD for up to 32GB expansion) and a 5 megapixel camera (capable of 720p recording). NFC is also on board for mobile payment (and other) duties.

The bad news is the 9900 isn’t cheap, although we weren’t expecting it would be with sim-free prices pitched at over £500. Play has it on for £520, as does Amazon – interestingly Amazon’s release date is a week later at August 22nd.

Voda’s two year contracts start from £41 per month if you want the handset for free, although that comes with a good bundle of minutes (1200), unlimited texts, but only 500Mb of data.

Cut the minutes to 500 and you can have the handset for £26 per month, the downside being the substantial up-front free of £299 for the phone itself. In total, you’re only saving £60 across the two years on that deal anyway, with a lot less minutes per month (less than half, in fact).

Neither deal looks particularly compelling, truth be told.

BlackBerry is still doing fairly well in the UK, but Rim’s performance on the world stage has been distinctly lacking of late. The firm is hoping this handset, along with a full touchscreen model – the Torch 9850 with a 3.7 inch display – will help turn its fortunes around.