RIM has unveiled its first, long-awaited BlackBerry smartphone in a clamshell format.

The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, announced on Wednesday, is part of RIM’s more consumer-oriented product line. Once an almost entirely enterprise-oriented company, the Canadian manufacturer now sells about as many handsets to consumers as to business customers.

The quad-band, Edge-based Flip weighs just over 100g, and measures 3.9 by 1.9 by 0.7 inches. It has two colour displays В— one 240-by-320-pixel internal screen, and a smaller, external LCD for alerting the user to incoming emails, text messages and phone calls. The phone takes microSD/SDHC cards of up to 16GB capacity.

The device’s 900mAh battery will provide four hours of talk time and 14 days of standby time, according to RIM. Other features are fairly standard for a BlackBerry: 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, a 2-megapixel camera, DataViz’s Documents To Go office suite and, of course, full compatibility with BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Other than the fact that the Flip will launch this autumn, exact release dates and pricing have not yet been announced.
  The Pearl Flip 8220 is RIM’s first clamshell handset