That’s surprising and disappointing, considering the audio quality on my BlackBerry Bold 9000 is comparable to my high-end, Sony Walkman (both with headphones)!

9700 is so cheap, i mean really cheap that my ringtones sound like a fart in a oven. Sad.

that being said, with the 9700 being out, the 8900 has met its match. 3G and track pad out weight my love of the 83xx/8900 style keyboard.

Brandon.
PS I will be moving on to the 9700 once I get extremely sick of the 8900′s spotty trackball lol.

i see the 8910 only arriving with the new trackpad, a la the Blackberry Atlas that was spied by salomondrin here: http://www.salomondrin.net/2009/09/29/blackberry-atlas-another-bold/

that’s if it even arrives in the US at all… i think the 8520 is designed to replace the 8900 for the budget crowd while the 8900 was only around as a stopgap until the 9700 was released. a 3G+trackpad revision to the 8900 would straddle both products too much and end up cannibalizing sales rather than carving out it’s own niche. i say that because hardware-wise, the 8900 (and potential 8910) has the same size, screen size/res, GPS, and memory allotment as the 9700. the only differences are the keyboard styling, trackball, and cpu being 112MHz slower. if it were resurrected in the lineup with a trackpad and 3G, it would basically just be a 9700 with a different haircut and be about the same price… there would be no logical reason for it’s existence with the 9700 next to it in the lineup.

T-Mobile Germany removed the 8900 from the store in early january, too.

Perhaps TMO is going to launch the fabled 8910?

Yes, I was first in line to buy the Bold 9700 from a T-Mobile retail store the day it came out, but to be honest I’ve been disappointed by the very slow 3G data speeds, dropped calls due to poor 3G to 2G handoffs during calls and overall lag.

I found myself forcing my Bold to 2G only so that I could once again enjoy stability since T-Mobile has excellent call quality and good 2G service in my area.

T-Mobile unfortunately has rolled out their 3G network poorly in some places. In my area, they truly skimped in a rush to deploy it leaving large gaps without any 3G service despite the map indicating full blown 3G. It seems they only lit up about 65% of the sites with 3G which makes 3G RF poorer outdoors and even worse indoors.

Yes it’s true, not everyone has 3G/3.5G service (though in a country like Australia, most people do, even if they don’t know it), but virtually all 3G/3.5G devices are backwards-compatible and work fine with 2G/2.5G networks (with the except of technology changes, such as a network making the move from CDMA to W-CDMA, I’ve never heard of 3G/3.5G handsets NOT being backwards-compatible…)!

The 3G/3.5G transceiver in a cell phone doesn’t cost all that much extra, so this begs the question – why not just make everything backwards-compatible?

It’d be cheaper for manufacturers (less parts required, less models to advertize, etc…), and allow current 2G/2.5G customers to be “3G/3.5G ready”…