Smackdown: BlackBerry Bold 9000 vs. Apple iPhone 3G

Starting soon: the smartphone smackdown of summer '08.

Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 3G goes on sale in less than three weeks, on July 11. The official U.S. release date of RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold 9000 is "July/August," although according to the Boy Genius Report, the device could arrive in Canada as early as this Wednesday.

So how do the year's most eagerly-awaited smartphones stack up?

Pinstack.com has published the handy tale of the tape shown at right (click on the image to see it full size). Meanwhile, Crackberry.com produced what is still the most exhaustive hands-on review of the new BlackBerry, using a pre-release version purchased in May on eBay. The YouTube version is pasted below (e-mail subscribers, click here).

The iPhone Blog, CrackBerry's sister site, has posted a video side-by-side of the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold, but it's not as useful; it uses the old iPhone and by the time they got their hands on CrackBerry's Bold, RIM had turned off the PINs. You can see that video on YouTube here.

What none of these comparisons can predict, of course, is how rich the two software ecosystems are likely to be, and how much value third-party apps will add to either device.

See also: The keyboard wars, Round 2

[Chart reposted with kind permission of Hayden James at Pinstack.com.]