@L
No, it's a contract that you accept when you click "I accept" - breaking your contract means you can be subjected to any number of laws as may be specified in the EULA. So while not a law in itself, the EULA is still a legal entity - if you violate it, and you are sued for doing so, then you may challenge the validity of the EULA in a court of law.

Perhaps they just need MOAR.

Well, RIM launched the 8700 in 2006 and it was included in the list of products receiving updates to the v4.5 OS - for the most part though only their products from 2007 onwards (those with >32MB of RAM) got upgraded... still, that's easily 8-10 handsets in market that were all upgraded to the "latest" OS, and run the same apps as devices running OS 4.6 and 4.7. OS5.0 which has been leaked around so much that surely it will be coming to release soon similarly upgrades most of the products from 2007 onwards through these products rolling out the door - that's easily 16 handsets that RIM is keeping "alive" through SW... so yes, while it seems they are launching numerous devices, it really isn't that many (unless you're counting color variants) - they introduced something like 7-8 devices in 2008 and this year they have only launched four: Pearl Flip 8230, Tour 9600, Curve 8520 and Bold 9700. There is at least one more (Storm2) that will definitely launch before year end, likely before Black Friday so they can get the sales...I would be surprised not to see a more formal announcement give its on their site and all.

@N900 - No, iPhone, 1st gen Touch and iPhone 3G all have the same processor, which is ARM1136 (1176?) based. 3GS and 2nd Gen Touch are the only ones running Cortex A8 cores. These are also the only processors with support for OpenGL-ES2.0

Also, Palm Pre is rocking OMAP3430, not iPhone - 3GS uses a Sammy apps core. Both are Cortex A8 based parts.

RIM is still stuck with XScale in their Marvell processors, so while this one is running at 624 MHz, it is not in the same league as the others as it is still ~ARM11 class (though technically ARMv5TE not ARMv6). This version of Bold is rumoured to be using a new version of Marvell's Tavor chip at 65nm instead of 90 though, so I expect that power wise it should be better than the 9000 - I suspect though that the comments on 50% better browser based on HW is complete BS.

Honestly, I think this looks nice, but I wouldn't be trading in my current device (9000) for it - This product is coming to market ~12mo after the first Bold launched and they have really tighted up the design - I think I can hold out another year to see what gen3 looks like.

This is also I guess the first RIM product coming from their Bochum office? Given where they chose to do the announcements? They only set that up last summer sometime, like June-July IIRC... so brand new office to product rolling out the door in

LTE does not have a "voice mode" operation, it is all packet based like WiFi. You would have to run IMS or SIP over top of it. I expect that Big Red will be launching handsets that have EV-DO revA + LTE, and you will only use LTE for data transfers at least until 2013-15 timeframe. Rolling out IMS is not trivial.

LTE can operate on any of the same frequency spectrum as GSM, CDMA or UMTS, though most carriers have indicated that it will be used on the 700MHz spectrum - either way you're more likely to end up with penta- or hexa-band UMTS/LTE handsets that cover bands 1/2/4/5-6/8/12-14 that would give you pretty good global coverage. Most UMTS handsets are moving to be tri-band or quad-band already.

^^^Well with the power of *subtraction* at my fingertips, I believe Mr. Jha's annual salary was $800,000, and the remainder is in options, likely to vest over a four- or five-year term, probably longer.

You mean like the Unify4life Game|Shadow? http://www.unify4life.com/

What's interesting is not the total number of handsets but the *rate* of handset sales. RIM has 21M subscribers in 2009, and they hit their *first* 1M total subscribers in 2004, so they have added 20M subs and sold likely 45M of that 50M in the last 5 years alone. Bully for them.

Well, 4.3 Gbps per lane... likely talking four lanes (one per bank)... so for example USB3.0 SuperSpeed gives 4.6 Gbps, you you could use this to basically dump your payload directly into RAM at speed, which would be nice. Look at the bandwidth requirements for high performance 3D rendering, and you can see why this might be attractive to GPU or AP manufacturers.
Then you have to look at other factors, like board routing and package size. LPDDR2 at 400MHz will give you 3.2GBps of throughput, but you need 32b of data, some 24 odd b of c/a plus eight control lines and clocks - some 64 odd bits total for the interface, matched lengths, on-chip termination for each, etc etc... massive package at a minimum (just look at some of the JEDEC footprints). For this, you're talking maybe 8-9 pins per bank, total of 32-36, 40 tops for 17GBps... consider this is likely going package-on-package, and you can see why this would be useful.

Or you can't because you're not in the industry and have no clue what I just wrote.