Scancom Sees Record Orders for Bold Amidst UK BlackBerry Drought

Scancom (www.scancom.co.uk), operator of the UK's only dedicated BlackBerry store, is reporting record sales as major phone providers, including Vodafone, put customers on waiting lists for the new BlackBerry(R) Bold(TM) smartphone.

Thousands of UK customers are being made to wait to get their hands on the new smartphone, but Scancom is one of the few outlets to actually have them in stock.

Chen Kotecha ACA, Managing Director of Scancom, said: "Customers saw announcements earlier this week from the big providers that said the Blackberry Bold was available for purchase, but the truth is that even high-value business users are being told to wait for delivery, without being told how long.

"We knew demand for the new phone was going to be unprecedented, so we made sure we had a full stock before advertising that we had it in."

The new Blackberry model is proving so popular because although many people associate BlackBerry usage with business, Chen says, there has been huge interest in the product from both the business and consumer segments.

Scancom was one of the first mobile providers in the UK to offer ORANGE Bold to its business customer base.

Its ORANGE BlackBerry Enterprise offers an unprecedented 200MB UK BlackBerry email allowance and 7MB of international BlackBerry Enterprise Email roaming.

Chen Kotecha adds: "Our Orange Bold Solo offers are very strong. The Orange tariffs offering inclusive international calls as part of the free minutes to up to 28 countries continues to fuel demand for the Bold, and BlackBerry in general. We have always known RIM devices are the best on the market. With the Bold - RIM have just exceeded themselves!"

The Blackberry Bold is RIM's most feature-packed handset to date and the first to support HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) networks for high speed data downloads.

Besides the usual stable of messaging and e-mail applications, the phone, which comes with a new user interface, features a two-megapixel camera and satellite navigation functions.

Scancom recently partnered with GPXS to offer customers BBDIRECT, a hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server based on Microsoft OWA.