The BlackBerry Bold is a line of smartphones developed by Research in Motion. The family was launched in 2008 with the 9000 Model. In 2009 the form factor was shrunk with the 9700 and the Tour 9630. In 2010 RIM released the 9650 and 9780 refresh with OS6. In 2011 came the 9788 and 9790 along with the current flagship - the 9900/9930 series. The 9900/9930 and 9790 are touchscreen smartphones, released in August and November 2011. The Bold family is known for its distinctive form factor; efficient, finger-friendly QWERTY keyboard, typical BlackBerry messaging capabilities with a distinctive, more premium keyboard than the Curve series. The Bold series is usually more expensive and has more premium materials (eg. leather, soft touch, carbon fiber, metal) unlike the curve (plastic, glossy), and has much better specs. There are two basic form factors with the Bold line, the original larger size on the 9000 and 9900 Series and the "baby bold" form factor the other models have.
A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone or camera phone. Today's models also serve to combine the functions of portable media players, low-end compact digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and GPS navigation units. Modern smartphones typically also include high-resolution touchscreens, web browsers that can access and properly display standard web pages rather than just mobile-optimized sites, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi and mobile broadband.
The most common mobile operating systems (OS) used by modern smartphones include Google's Android, Apple's iOS, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS, and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such operating systems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple OS software updates over its lifetime.