Developer of Blackberry smartphones, canadian company Research In Motion opened its first BlackBerry retail store in China on Wednesday. RIM hopes that it could boost the smartphone’s presence in the Asian market. They call the Beijing store an “experience center” that will give visitors a better opportunity to try Blackberries and other RIM devices. “The key point is to attract users to the BlackBerry smart phone and stimulate purchases,” said Natalie Wang, a company spokeswoman. BlackBerries have been sold in China since 2006, but RIM sold the phones through third-party distributors, now “the consumers couldn’t really get a total experience out of buying the phone.” Currently customers can buy only two phone models, the BlackBerry 8910 Curve and the BlackBerry 8310 Curve.
Softpedia also reported, that Research In Motion has invited a number of people to an unspecified event to be held in collaboration with AT&T on 3 August in New York. Rumours say the event could be the first step for the launch of the company’s new BlackBerry 9800 Slider, which will be the first RIM device to run the new BlackBerry OS 6.0. “I would suspect this would be the new BlackBerry 9800, a touch-screen slider phone. It was well known it was with AT&T and they’d said they’d have two devices later in their fiscal second quarter” a Morgan Keegan & Co. analyst, Tavis McCount.