First Wi-Fi-Enabled BlackBerry Cleared By The FCC

Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for a brand new BlackBerry.

Normally, that wouldn’t be overly important but this bad boy BlackBerry was approved for 802.11a/b/g. Yup, that would be Wi-Fi, folks. What we’ve all been waiting for!

Including Wi-Fi on smartphones should be a no-brainer. To-date, though, many smartphones sold in the U.S. have not had the speedy wireless Internet technology on the spec list. Palm Treos? Nope. BlackBerrys? Nope.

Some Windows Mobile devices, such as the HTC Wing, have Wi-Fi, but it is still rare to find on many smartphones. For the BlackBerry faithful, this leaked information from the FCC is good news.

Details in FCC documents are sometimes sketchy and even wrong about things like the quality of the camera or exactly which type of USB port a phone might have but they are never wrong about the bands of spectrum that the phones will operate in.

The FCC site was kind enough to spill the beans on this newest BlackBerry, which, according to the pencil drawings included in the filings, looks like the 8800 series of BlackBerrys. (That’s the enterprise line-up.)

It was approved for use in the GSM/EDGE 850/1900 bands, as well as for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi of the a, b, and g varieties. This phone could work on either the T-Mobile or AT&T networks.

Given T-Mobile’s slightly more aggressive roll-out of Wi-Fi-enabled devices (like the HTC Wing), it is more likely to be the carrier of this device.

Of course, very little else is know at this point. FCC documents typically go public several months before handsets are actually available for sale.

The timing meshes fairly well with recent statements from RIM CEO Jim Balsillie that enterprise users would see a Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerry some time in the fourth quarter of this year.

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