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A little over a week ago, the FCC approved the first Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerry for release the U.S. That device, the BlackBerry 8820, was officially introduced by RIM today. AT&T is due to release the smartphone later this summer in the U.S. for an as-of-yet undisclosed price.

The new quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE-enabled (no 3G, unfortunately) BlackBerry, which supports the 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi standards, is a UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access)dual-mode device. UMA, as a fixed-mobile convergence technology, allows the 8820 to seamlessly switch voice calls and data connections between a wireless carrier's cellular network and a Wi-Fi network; depending on which is cheapest to use or available at a given moment.

As with other recent BlackBerrys, the 8820 features the trackball navigation system introduced with the Pearl last fall. RIM says the 8820 sports its thinnest design yet for a full QWERTY thumb-keyboard BlackBerry model.

In addition to Wi-Fi, the 8820 integrates GPS. As a result, the BlackBerry can pinpoint its location and provide "out-of-the-box" support for a wide variety of location-based applications and services, including RIM's bundled BlackBerry Maps solution.

Bluetooth 2.0 allows the 8820 to support hands-free headsets (including stereo types), car kits and other Bluetooth peripherals. It can handle polyphonic, mp3 and MIDI ringtones.

With the Pearl, RIM started adding multimedia support to its handhelds and smartphones. The 8820 continues that trend with the most recent version of RIM's BlackBerry media player. With it, RIM says users can play music and search by title, genre, artist or album name. Videos can now be played in full screen mode.

A new desktop media manager from Roxio is supposed to make it easier for users to manage media files on their desktop and automatically copy or convert pictures, music and videos for optimal playback on the smartphone, according to RIM.

There’s no camera.

The 8820's microSD slot supports both standard and SDHC expansion cards—the former tops out at 2GB, while the later will eventually support 32GB microSDHC cards. Currently, microSDHC is available in 4GB, but 8GB cards are expected to ship before the close of 2007. The iPhone by contrast maxes out at either 4GB or 8GB of storage, with no way to add more memory. By contrast, with the 8820, you'll never run out storage.

Of course, the 8820 features RIM's standard array of applications, including a PIM, instant messenger, and web browser, along with support for push e-mail and other applications through the BlackBerry Internet Service (for up to 10 personal and corporate e-mail accounts) and BlackBerry Enterprise Sever in IBM Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise environments.

To meet security requirements, the BlackBerry 8820 is compliant with Wi-Fi security protocols, including WEP, WPA, WPA2 and Cisco Compatible Extensions. In addition, the BlackBerry 8820 includes IPSec-based software that supports the most commonly deployed VPN gateways.

In addition to a speakerphone, the 8820 offers speaker independent voice recognition for voice activated dialing.

On comment: Seeing as how T-Mobile has the largest Wi-Fi footprint in the U.S. among mobile operators, by a mile, and how the operator just rolled out the country's first UMA-based cellular/Wi-Fi fixed-mobile convergence offering with its Hotspot @Home service, our bet is it won't be too long (after AT&T first ships the 8820 ) before T-Mobile does the same.