Hasta La Gadget!

Alltel Wireless has announced that the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 smartphone will hit retail stores and the online site beginning in early May.

The handset is one of the few flip smartphones out there, combining the popular form factor with a genuine BlackBerry handheld. This model is a bit larger than most other flips–it extends more than half a foot when fully opened–but it features the Pearl’s SureType-style QWERTY keyboard, along with a 2.3-inch LCD and a 2 megapixel camera.

The 8230 is essentially the same as the somewhat buggy 8220 model on T-Mobile that we reviewed several months ago, except that the 8230 lacks Wi-Fi. Hopefully RIM and Alltel will have cleaned up some of the bugs by the time the handset is released–most notably, an extremely slow Web browser implementation (much more so than other BlackBerrys).