With the announcement of the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9650 and BlackBerry® Pearl™ 3G smartphones today, I wanted to provide you with an overview of the handsets from a developer perspective to help you understand what opportunities these new smartphones open up for you.

The BlackBerry Bold 9650 smartphone is the latest handset to join the Bold series of smartphones, known for their high-end styling and performance.  The BlackBerry Bold 9650 smartphone will ship with BlackBerry OS 5.0 software, which includes a variety of new enhancements for end users.  For developers, there are substantial improvements across the board which we have been covering on this blog for some time now.

For Java, check out this page outlining all of the new APIs and features in BlackBerry OS 5.0.

For Widgets, check out this great post introducing BlackBerry Widget technology – and stay tuned for additional posts that will dive deeper into the power of Widgets on the BlackBerry® Application Platform.

Here is what you need to know about the new BlackBerry Bold 9650 smartphone:

• Supports CDMA/EVDO Rev A networks in North America and UMTS/HSPA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks abroad, providing 3G cellular connectivity around the world
• 480×360 screen resolution
• 3.2 MP Camera with Auto Focus
• Location Support with Assisted and Autonomous GPS
• WiFi Support – 802.11b/g
• 512MB Flash Memory (Application Space) and MicroSD Support (up to 32GB)
• Support for OpenGL

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone is the latest handset to join the Pearl family of smartphones, known for their sleek style and slim size.  The BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone will also ship with BlackBerry OS 5.0 software.

Here is what you need to know about the new BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone:

• Supports tri-band UMTS/HSDPA and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks for worldwide connectivity
• 360 x 400 screen resolution
• 3.2 MP Camera with Auto Focus
• Location Support with Assisted and Autonomous GPS
• WiFi Support – 802.11b/g/n
• 256MB Flash Memory (Application Space) and MicroSD Support (up to 32GB)

In addition, there are two keyboard layouts for the BlackBerry Pearl 3G smartphone.  The BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 smartphone features a 20-key condensed QWERTY keyboard. The BlackBerry® Pearl™ 3G 9105 smartphone features a traditional phone keyboard with 14 keys.   Both models include SureType® software that completes words as the user types, making texting fast and accurate.

If you’re extending standard RIM text fields, the keyboard variants  should be of no impact to your application, as you’ll get all of the same predictive text and spell-check functionality that you would normally get when using these fields.  However, if you have physically mapped out which characters are associated with which keys, you may have a little more work ahead of you.

We are really excited about the launch of BlackBerry Bold 9650 and BlackBerry 3G Pearl smartphones!  Get started now by checking out the web development tools and Java® application development tools on our website, and the smartphone simulators. Let us know what you think in the comments!