BlackBerry Bold 9000 Review

By Steve & Kylie Jurgensen

First Impressions

MyMobile Verdict

Barack Obama uses a BlackBerry. And according to CelebrityBlackBerrySightings.com so do George Clooney, James Bond, Heidi Klum, Madonna and Gisele Bundchen. With whom we have something in common, being BlackBerry owners too. But as of today we’re one better; we have in our possession the new
BlackBerry Bold, and we promise to tell all. Research in Motion have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to the iPhone juggernaut, releasing the Bold – hailed as the apotheosis of QWERTY enterprise smart phones – to secure their stranglehold on the corporate market. Their iPhone killer, the more media savvy touch screen BlackBerry Storm, follows in close succession. Clearly RIM is determined not to fade into the background, and this is further asserted with the BlackBerry Bold’s unashamedly weighty silhouette. At 114 x 66 x 15 mm, and weighing 136g, this is not a mobile for the frail or weak. The chrome trim accentuates a gleaming black front panel, and a textured rear cover fitted with a brushed metal tab housing the logo, camera lens and flash evokes memories of gleaming dashboards, chrome dials, and the heady aroma of newly polished seat leather. The edge trim is heavily populated with a wide range of buttons, sockets and connectivity options: hotswappable microSD, 3.5mm jack, mini-USB, volume rocker, camera button and voice dialling shortcut. On the front we find BlackBerry’s signature “orb” navigation button, flanked by oversized Call, End/ Power, BlackBerry and Back keys. Below this simple but imposing line-up lies the QWERTY keyboard, which is beautifully backlit and ergonomically designed for your typing pleasure. As for the display, this half VGA (480 x 320) expanse is reputed to have inspired the Bold’s name by virtue of its vibrant colour and brilliant definition. We fire it up, and observe a moment of stunned appreciation. Despite the screen’s less than stellar dimensions, the impact is vivid and uncompromisingly clear. A strip of almost touchable icons leap out at you by virtue of cunning neon highlights and precise navigational accuracy. M’Lord, M’Lady, your BlackBerry awaits. From here on in ensued hours of unfettered
pleasure. At last we get all the connectivity options you could hope for, super-responsivity thanks to the new generation Intel Xscale PXA250 processor with 624 MHz of grunt, high speed data transfer, enviable reception, great call quality, all the peripherals, eye-popping graphics glamming up the trusty BlackBerry interface, effortless navigation and data input, and a battery that seemed to be enjoying itself as much as we were and just kept going.
Tempted? Read on. 

Navigation

We are fans of the BlackBerry Curve, so it’s great to find that the  BlackBerry Bold has all the ease of use of the Curve, and so much more. The handy little orb is back, giving you far more flexibility than the standard 5-way D-pad. For browsing, its use has been enhanced to enable you to zoom in on the parts of a web page – it takes a little bit of getting used to but is infinitely preferable to clicking your way across a page crossword-style. We also can’t complain about the rest of the navigation cluster. It’s pared down to four keys: Call, End/Power, the BlackBerry (Menu) key, and a Back button. They’re all unmissably large and laid out in a row, so you can’t possibly put a digit wrong. The keypad itself benefits from being the latest iteration of an already winning formulation, so you get size, simplicity, keys that are differentiated by both visual and tactile means, and the sort of responsiveness that only a supercharged processor can provide. The home screen and top level menus have all been vamped up for wow appeal, with high-resolution graphics that leap off the screen like touch screen icons. Once you get below the surface it’s back to BlackBerry as usual. The biggest difference is how quickly everything happens. The only lag you get is the first time you start up your device, and from then on you can expect immediate action whether you’re navigating by orb, voice, or data entry.

Calling

The days of BlackBerrys delivering poor call quality are a thing of the past. Whether making or receiving calls, the BlackBerry Bold offers all the clarity and ease of use you’d expect from your landline, with the mobility and added value of a cellphone. Both reception and coverage were excellent. The Bold is a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) phone with HSDPA providing lightning quick data transfer, where available. In terms of performance, the pickup on the speaker phone was truly remarkable. Voice dialling and commands work well. It goes without saying that the options for ringtones, call settings and contacts are virtually limitless, and the beauty of buying a smart phone that is as customisable as the BlackBerry is that if you have unique needs or don’t like the default set-up you can no doubt download an alternative. There’s 1GB of on-board memory and 128MB flash memory, with additional expandable memory available via the hotswappable microSD card. In terms of connectivity, the Bold has it all: GPRS, 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g), USB 2.0 and a plethora of Bluetooth profiles including headset, hands-free, serial port, desktop connectivity, wireless bypass, data transfer, dial-up networking, audio source (A2DP), AV remote control and SIM access. It also has RIM wireless modem and tethered modem capability.

Camera

For too long BlackBerry owners have suffered substandard or non-existent mobile cameras on the grounds that such frivolous consumer peripherals were unnecessary – undesirable even – for business users. In the main, the Bold makes great strides towards consumer friendliness. We are happy to report that it does have a camera, but there are many rumblings out there about the meagre 2 megapixels, weak LED flash, lack of autofocus, and extremely limited options for image settings, effects and editing. So in poor light with an amateur behind the lens, your chances of getting quality photos are not great. There’s a video camera too, but this is even worse, producing grainy, pixelated video that barely rates YouTube quality. But at least it’s there. When we got caught on top of Paekakariki Hill watching the Targa Rally in gale force winds and driving rain, the Bold managed to capture good enough images to recreate the action for the folks back home that night. And on the beach, in beautiful weather, the photos are not bad at all. Another cool addition, thanks to the on-board GPS, is that you can enable images to be automatically geotagged with their geographical location.

Messaging

Messaging is where BlackBerrys have earned their stripes, so it is only appropriate that the Bold delivers an unparalleled messaging experience. Data entry doesn’t get any better or quicker than this expansive keyboard with full suite of ergonomic, tactile, responsive keys and spell check. While reading text is a bit of a waste of the display’s potential, the clarity and usability of the light-sensing screen keeps eyestrain to a minimum, no matter what the ambient light. Messaging options include SMS, MMS, BlackBerry Instant Messenger and email (BES, BIS, POP3, IMAP4, Java-based, Webmail). The reliability of BlackBerry’s push email has yet to be trumped, and on the Bold you get HTML support as well, so you can see images in your emails, and new search functionality allows you to search by sender or subject. The scope for setting up your messaging to display and deliver content exactly how you want it is better than any other phone we’ve seen. Underpinning all of this is the superfast HSDPA engine, ensuring that not only will messages fly from under your fingertips, but incoming mail will arrive with unprecedented speed.

Applications

Bowing to consumer demand, the BlackBerry Bold offers some distinctly CrackBerry features that are guaranteed to bring joy to all. Foremost of these is the new Bedside Clock mode, which converts the display to a clock with luminous dials, mutes all calls and messages, and fades all the phone’s lights (status indicator, orb, keys, display) so as not to interrupt your (or your partner’s) circadian rhythms. The music player is the same old interface, no fancy album art here, but the bundled headset gives great audio and the internal stereo speakers produce sound that is less tinny than most at a volume suitable for sharing. Supported audio formats include 3GP, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/. asf), WMA 9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/ eAAC+. There’s also a voice recorder. Video playback can only be described as delicious, making the most of the half-VGA screen. Supported video formats include DIVX 4, H.263, H.264 and WMV3, with DIVX 5/6 and XviD partially supported. With the enterprise market in mind, security features abound. These include password protection and keyboard lock, support for AES or 3DES encryption when integrated with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). FIPS-compliant encryption (validation in progress) and optional support for S/MIME, which provides secure email transmission. The web browser is a great leap forward from the BlackBerry Curve, an HTML/XHTML browser that is WAP2 compliant and provides an immediate rendering of the whole web page, which you can then zoom in on and navigate using the orb. Browser push is also supported, enabling you to receive data such as weather reports, stock quotes or breaking news from websites as a message in your message list. You can view and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Dataviz Documents-to-go, though you’re likely to want to upgrade this for document creation and PDFs as well. The on-board GPS also needs the assistance of a third-party mapping application such as Google Maps for Mobile in order to be useful in NZ. Preloaded games include Sudoku, Wordmole, Texas Hold’em King 2 and Klondike. We hear that BlackBerry Game Service allows multiplayer gaming using Wi-Fi or the cell network, but we weren’t able to test this. The organiser has everything you need to get your life in order, and it can be synced with your desktop using BlackBerry Desktop Manager Version 4.6. It goes without saying that the Bold is fully customisable for both business and consumer applications, although we must admit we were a little disappointed with the limited range of BlackBerry Bold apps on offer from the BlackBerry website at this early stage.

SUMMARY

If you’re on your own dime and you’ve been hanging out for the ultimate BlackBerry, the Bold is the mobile for you. It does everything other BlackBerrys can do, but better, quicker, and with far more style. If your phone has to do service as a mobile office, and significant amounts of messaging, data entry and document handling are unavoidable, we can’t see why you’d want to settle for anything less than the Bold’s vibrant screen, full suite of connectivity options, and relatively huge keyboard. Tell your boss you can’t live without one. If, on the other hand, you have really disliked BlackBerrys up till now and you were hoping the Bold would be a completely new breed of device, you’re probably better off converting to Apple or sitting tight: a Storm is on the horizon.

MyMobile Verdict