When RIM announced its first smartphone with Wi-Fi, it said that AT&T would be offering this model in the near future. However, it didn't say exactly when. A new report indicates that the BlackBerry 8820 has begun to arrive at AT&T warehouses, but that doesn't mean this device will immediately be shipped to stores.

The reason for the delay is AT&T is currently offering the BlackBerry 8800, which is essentially identical to the 8820 but without Wi-Fi. As these two smartphones are expected to sell for the same price, if they were offered at the same time, this carrier would almost certainly have a hard time selling the current model.

Therefore, AT&T is going to only ship 8820 units to stores that have already sold out of the 8800, according to the Boy Genius Report.

An Overview of the BlackBerry 8820

The BlackBerry 8820 will have a full QWERTY keyboard, a QVGA screen, and a built-in GPS receiver.

It will also be one of RIM's latest generation of models that include significant support for multimedia, including playing video and MP3 files.

For storing large audio and video files, the 8820's microSD card slot will support SDHC, allowing it to use cards that are as large as 32 GB, when these come on the market. microSD cards with 8 GB of storage are expected later this year.

In addition to 802.11 b, g, and a., it will be a quad-band GSM/GPRS device with EDGE. This BlackBerry will also sport Bluetooth 2.0.