PDA-1

The first ‘crop’ of BlackBerry® from Maxis, available to Maxis customers, is the BlackBerry 7290™ - a quad-band, handheld which features Bluetooth® support; ample memory; a bright, backlit colour screen; and exceptional battery performance.

BlackBerry® from Maxis is currently available to selected customers only. It will be available to the general public within the next 2 months. Be among the first few to experience this new wireless lifestyle by registering your interest with us.
- excerpt from Maxis website

We were beginning to think that BlackBerries will never crop up in Malaysia given the fact that neighboring Singapore’s Starhub have been offering it for a couple of years now, but are finally relieved to hear that Maxis decided to pick it up for a run.

The model first featured is the 7290 which is a GSM quad-band unit with a 240×160-pixel, 16-bit TFT color display and built-in Bluetooth - a good choice by Maxis as BlackBerry users in Malaysia are expected to be global travelers that would depend on quad-band roaming worldwide. Bluetooth is definitely welcome on the 7290 as RIM had figured out on the onset that executives probably wouldn’t want to look like dorks talking into the wide-bodied communicator and would opt for a BT headset for voice functions.

Maxis’ BlackBerry webpage says that its only available to selected registered enquiries, but their ad in a local newspaper says otherwise: It is now available on its BlackBerry Internet Solution (tailored for individuals’ use) for RM55 a month “with any data package”, which should mean that you’ll have to cough up that additional 55 Ringgit above the cost of a data plan - plus a basic voice plan.

We can tell you for sure, all those charges add up to a small fortune. Maxis might just kill the ‘Berry themselves before it’s gets a shot in the hot push-email market, considering that Microsoft’s on a warpath with push-email functionality expected in their next version of the Windows Mobile operating system, offered on a wider choice of PDA phones and smartphones.

The BlackBerry 7290 itself costs RM2,400 but if you get all those plans signed up and before 30 June you can have it for RM200 less. Available at all Maxis Centers and selected Maxis Authorized Service Agents (MASA).

We’d suggest you sit down some with Maxis Center personnel to find out just what Maxis is trying to say in its ads, plus we ain’t too sure about their ambiguity in plan charges nor where/who the heck are those “selected” agents.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2005 and is filed under BlackBerry, Communicators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.