Research in Motion (RIM), now freed from the shackles of lawsuit hell, announced the Blackberry 7130g, a slimmed-down smartphone that weighs four ounces and is a mere three-quarters of an inch thick. There’s no QWERTY keyboard due to its smaller 4.5-inch candy bar form factor, but that’s okay, the 7130g uses the SureType keyboard layout which combines phone dialing and QWERTY with its clever software to make things easy. A little screen size is sacrificed, too, where the display is 240×260 rather than the larger 320×240 of its older and larger brother, the Blackberry 8700g.

The 7130g is a cellphone as well as a PDA with text messenging, email and web browsing capabilities. It also has an innovative autosensing function that adjusts brightness of screen and keyboard according to ambient light. It’s fast, too, with a Intel XScale 312MHz processor on board. Of course, it has Bluetooth connectivity and quad-band network support, and surprisingly, will be available first in the UK, shipping elsewhere later. – Charlie White

Press release [RIM, via Trusted Reviews]
from gizmodo