Vodafone Essar Launches BlackBerry Storm In India

The highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm is here. Vodafone Essar and Research In Motion (RIM) have announced the first ever touch-screen BlackBerry smartphone designed for Vodafone, will be available exclusively for Vodafone customers in India from January 15, 2009. The BlackBerry Storm delivers the functionality of the BlackBerry solution and provides consumers and business customers with entertainment, information and communications at the tip of their fingers.

Priced at Rs 27,990/-, the innovative smartphone will be available across select Vodafone Stores nationally from January 15, 2009. Vodafone will create more than 150 ‘experience zones’ across the country in Vodafone Stores and Modern Trade Outlets to encourage customers to experience the new smartphone.

Harit Nagpal, director – Marketing and New Business, Vodafone Essar, said, “The BlackBerry Storm offers our customers easy access to voice and e-mail, a range of social media applications, multimedia content, satellite navigation and many other services on the move in a single device.”

Ravinder Takkar, director – Enterprise Business, Corporates and Carriers, Vodafone Essar, added, “The BlackBerry Storm also offers our enterprise customers a secure and reliable e-mail and messaging experience combined with all the desirable smartphone features, thus enabling them to further balance work and personal lives.”

The BlackBerry Storm smartphone combines the communication features, global connectivity and personal productivity advantages of the BlackBerry platform with a touch-screen technology that enhances the touch interface and enables easy and precise typing. Its ‘clickable’ touch-screen responds much like a physical keyboard and also supports single-touch, multi-touch and gestures for intuitive application navigation. It also features a built-in accelerometer, which automatically switches the display for use in landscape and portrait as the user rotates the handset.

Going further, the BlackBerry Storm supports multitasking so that users are not forced to constantly open and close applications. Other features and functions include:

• BlackBerry Internet Service, BlackBerry Professional Software and BlackBerry Enterprise Server support
• Preloaded DataViz Documents to Go allowing users to edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the handset
• 3.2 megapixel camera, with variable zoom, auto focus, and a powerful flash that also provides continuous lighting when recording video
• 1 GB of on board memory storage and a microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports up to 16 GB of additional storage per card.
• Removable and rechargeable 1400 mAhr battery that provides approximately six hours of talk time on 3G networks and 15 days of standby time

( www.moneycontrol.com )