Looks like Kevin at Crackberry.com was the lucky bidder for the Blackberry 9000 that sold for $828 on eBay last week. This pre-release phone is the first 3G device to emerge from Research in Motion. While there’s no official release date, most speculation is for a late summer AT&T exclusive. Kevin notes that the Blackberry 9000 has a plastic coated fake metal trim (hopefully it doesn’t squeak like my early model 8800 did), the keyboard is somewhere between an 8800 (tolerable) and Curve (great), OS 4.6 is on the device and he reports it’s rather speedy. He’s particularly impressed by the 480 x 320 HVDA Color LCD. There aren’t any screen shots of the v4.6 OS up on his site yet. It will be interesting to learn of what new functionality actually has made it to this device’s OS v4.6. Fingers crossed for HTML email.

Via: Crunchgear — Crackberry Blackberry 9000 Review

Don’t you hate that new customers get the best discounts on new phones? Here’s a way to get some money for your old phone when you trade it in for a Blackberry. Blackberry Smartphones eligible for purchase in the United States include the Curve as well as 88xx series. You can trade in a wide variety of phones and PDAS. For example the Palm 755P in excellent condition fetches a trade-in value of $125 when purchasing the new Blackberry 8330. If you’ve been thinking of buying a Blackberry, and would like to trade in your old phone/PDA - check out the Blackberry Tradeup site. Interesting that since these rebates are for the purchase of your old phone, the trade-up can be combined with any carrier incentive.

Link: Blackberry Trade Up Program
Link: Frequently Asked Questions about the Trade Up Program

CIO Magazine has a great article that provides links to six free programs for the Blackberry. Included among the freebies are: Yahoo! One Search, Tellme 2.0 with Voice, Opera Mini Web Browser, Google Mobile Updater, Tiny Twitter and Blackberry Weather Push. This is a followup article to one they did in February which spotlighted an additional 6 free Blackberry programs.

Link: 6 free Blackberry Downloads You Don’t Want to Miss
Link: Six (More) Free Blackberry Apps You Don’t Want to Miss
Via: Howardforums