The much-awaited Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry Bold 9700 will be available to the Australian customers, tomorrow onwards, from Telstra - the first Australian carrier to sell the enterprise and business-focused handset in the country.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700, a successor to the earlier BlackBerry Bold 9000, has reportedly been shipped to Telstra dealers all over the country. The new RIM smartphone will cost $85 per month over a two-year period.

Meanwhile, the new handset will be released on the Telstra rival - the merged carriers 3 and Vodafone - from December 2. Moreover, despite the fact that Optus has already launched a website listing the Bold 9700 for pre-orders, it will also begin selling the handset from early December.

Both Optus and 3 will sell the handset to business and consumer users at a monthly cost of $79, which incidentally is the price of the currently selling RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000.

The launch of the Bold 9700, which has a slightly bigger screen than its predecessor and features 3.2-megapixel camera, optical trackpad and new BlackBerry OS 5.0, comes at a time when the original Bold is supposedly losing market to the Apple iPhone.

Noting the Bold was waning under the popularity of the iPhone, analyst Mark Novosel, at IDC telecommunications, had earlier said: "As RIM release more devices, they'll certainly come back to that higher growth they've become accustomed to."