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A few days ago, RIM announced the coming of the new BlackBerry Bold with touch screen. This was no surprise, because like with any other smartphone manufacturer, the roadmap and early photos usually leak early anyway. Take these leaked BlackBerry photos for example.

The page on the RIM site that showed the new Bold smartphones was quickly removed. But that’s okay, because the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 have since been officially announced by RIM at the BlackBerry world event, held only a few days ago.

The two BlackBerry Bold models, the 9900 and the 9930 are quite similar. Both have a touch screen 2.8″ in size. The resolution is 640×480 pixels. As always, the Bold phones will have a slide out qwerty keyboard and an optical trackpad.

In summary, the smartphones have the following specifications:

• 1.2GHz CPU
• 768MB Memory
• BlackBerry 7 OS
• 8GB Flash & 32GB Micro SD
• 5 Megapixel Camera
• Video Recording At 720p
• HSPA+ (9900)
• CDMA (9930)
• Wifi-N
• Assisted GPS
• Accelerometer
• Proximity Sensor
• Near Field Communication

From the specifications, it is likely that the BlackBerry Bold 9930 will be used for American cdma networks, while the BlackBerry Bold 9900 mighty very well be released in Europe because of its gsm networks.

Tweakers was granted some time to play around with the BlackBerry 9900 and wrote a hands on review on the Bold 9900.

This BlackBerry is the first to make use of a Qualcomm processor, which is remarkable. So far, RIM has used Marvell PXA processors for its top models.

Like always, the new BlackBerries look like true BlackBerries. There was a time that this design was fairly popular, but Tweakers correctly observes that the market is gearing more and more towards phones with bigger screens (usually around 4”). So why RIM is sticking with 2.8” screens is anybody’s guess.

The keyboard is an improvement over previous Bold phones. The overall design of the Bold phones is both prettier and sturdier than the design of previous Bold models. Metal is used instead of plastic. The 9900 Bold’s user interface is said to react very quickly, although during usage it becomes obvious that it wasn’t design with touch screen input in mind.

It is pointed out that browsing on the Bold 9900 works really nicely. A Sunspider benchmark has been run that clearly shows the BlackBerry Bold 9900 blowing a whole bunch of other modern smartphones out of the water, including the HTC Desire and the Galaxy S. The Bold 9900 performs around 8 times better than the Bold 9780.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 will also support html5 video. The browser has the tendency to hang every once in a while. And also zooming in on websites doesn’t always work flawlessly. Text is not always properly resized.