BlackBerry Porsche Design P'9981 phone launched in India

Research in Motion, along with Porsche Design has launched the new P’9981 luxury smartphone in India today. Research in Motion, of course is known for making business smartphones and also the PlayBook tablet. They’ve joined hands with Porsche Design to make this phone. While it’s been out for a while in other countries, it’s finally landed in India now. There’s some powerful hardware under the hood of this new P’9981 smartphone. Qualcomm’s MSM8655 SoC powers this design, it’s powered by a 1.2GHz processor with 768 MB of RAM at its disposal. There’s 8GB of storage space and that can be expanded right upto 32GB using a microSD card. 

One of the most expensive phones in the market today

The 2.8-inch touchscreen has a resolution of 640x360 with a pixel pitch of 298PPI. There’s a 5MP camera built into the back of the phone and it supports 720p video recording as well - there’s also a flash. Controlling the interface is done using the optical trackpad and the 35 keys on the hardware keyboard are backlit. There’s 3G connectivity as well as dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11n capability. The phone runs BlackBerry OS 7.0, but it’s upgradable to 7.1. There’s a price to pay for the luxury phone, and that is some 1.39 lakh rupees, several times more than most phones sold in the Indian market.

A rather unconventional design

The price being asked for the P’9981 is quite a lot. The phone is likely to be hit amongst those who want to make a fashion statement. In terms of features and performance and also the platform, it’s not the popular one in the street today. RIM has been in the news for a number of reasons - mainly for losing popularity and also losing out in the tablet race. A move such as the launch of this luxury smartphone is a bit awkward, considering the company isn’t doing too well and there are job cuts likely on the way. They’ve also had to cut down prices of the PlayBook tablet and then even stop selling the 16GB model.