|
Research in Motion (RIM) is a Canadian manufacturer, known for the BlackBerry phones. Probably far and away the best handsets for mobile email, these smart phones are the suits’ favorite gadgets. However, being good at one thing only just won´t cut it these days and all-in-one devices are what most customers are in search of. RIM seems to have hit the jackpot with the Pearl and Curve series (actually, the Curve is what has helped RIM go up) and the manufacturer needs to become more consumer-friendly, doesn´t it? BlackBerry is no longer BusinessBrick, and the high-end Bold proves the point. It is the first top-of-the-line Berry that really cares about fun apps (music, video) and is also the one to introduce the new design language of the Canadian firm (also used in the Storm and expected in future models). It won´t only strike the right note with your grandpa, but it´s classy and it surely won´t make anyone look queer as a three-dollar bill using it. The glossy-black plastic on the front goes along perfectly with the fake-leather back and silver elements, resulting in a really high-end looking smart phone. There is no metal and the leather isn’t genuine, yet it doesn’t feel cheap – its build quality is superb while the weight is within reason. 
Design Have the Bold in hand and you’ll find your thumb right on the trackball. It has become a standard feature of the BlackBerry phones and we cannot say we don’t like it. New users will feel it a little awkward to use, but in a day or two most of them will love it. Both the horizontal and vertical sensitivity can be adjusted in ten steps, so anyone is sure to find their right setting. The trackball allows much faster navigation to the desired field, when compared to a standard D-pad/joystick. The huge Send, Menu (left), Back and End (right) keys are positioned around it, with but a little gap between the two keys of each pair so you can feel them by touch. 
BlackBerry’s key feature is email and it requires excellent second to none keyboard. With years of experience in this, the Canadians surely know the ropes. The four rows have superb separation thanks to the silver strings, but we are in love with the horizontal key separation, thanks to the unique form of each button. Note how the left half have their right side lowered and vice versa. They are easy to press, have a good travel and well pronounced feedback. Although we have an affinity for wider keyboards (side sliding ones for example), this one would please even people who text to excess. 
Same goes for the display – we just love it, but its size doesn´t exactly go over big with us. 2.6 inches isn’t bad, but you know, bigger is better. The HVGA 480x320 resolution is also nice, although we´d rather it had a 480x360 screen, just like the Curve 8900 and the Storm, but you can´t have everything, right? Although a 65k color screen sounds mediocre, the image quality is good enough to enjoy a picture or video. The light sensor is very robust and immediately brightens the screen when you go out, so it remains visible in almost any condition. 
None of the side keys gives any trouble. These are mute button on the top, the volume rocker, a convenience (shortcut) key on the right and another one on the opposite side. The microSD slot, miniUSB and 3.5mm jack are all on left hand side of the phone. Taking out the microSD card out of the Bold turned out to be an uphill work, but we guess it must be our particular unit. The back houses only the camera and its LED flash while the button for releasing the battery cover is on the bottom. It is easy to press and we accidentally opened the cover a few times. 
BlackBerry OS v4.6 The BlackBerry Bold 9000 runs on the proprietary BlackBerry OS v4.6, just as the Curve 8900 which we recently reviewed. The homescreen and the main menu have neat and simple, yet very appealing icons. On top of that, the main menu and the standby screen can be customized beyond recognition and look even more attractive. Unfortunately, there are tons of text-only submenus, which get on your way quite more frequently than one mightprefer. Some nice graphics there couldn't possibly have cost RIM too much and it's a pity they spared themselves the effort. 
Some might argue we are just too picky here as the Bold 9000 target audience is the one least likely to be impressed by the eye-candy. That would be a point there, we guess, but this shortcoming is still worth noting (and hopefully fixed in upcoming editions of BlackBerry OS). After all you won't notice menus like that on Nokia E71, for instance. Anyone who has ever held a BlackBerry handset before will find their way around the Bold menu structure pretty easily but newcomers will need some time getting used to it. A nice example here would be the file manager, which is quite illogically located in the media submenus. Not that big a deal though, and everyone is likely to get familiar with the landscape in a couple of days. 
The homescreen is pretty well organized with 6 (by default) shortcut buttons placed at the bottom and all status icons at the top. The profiles can also be accessed straight from here, as well as two other features that you choose to assign to the convenience keys. The menu navigation of the BlackBerry Bold is somewhat different from what most competitors have to offer. Most other brands use soft-key based navigation where the available options for every menu item or feature are assigned to the context keys below the display. With RIM devices the menu key is in charge of all the contextual options that and it's really a new experience if you're used to the soft key labels keeping all options in sight. 
The BlackBerry Bold has almost flawless performance with very little lagging experienced throughout the review. The Storm had it much worse with submenus often taking their time to open. However we did experience some system instability here as well - the BlackBerry Bold crashed several times on us while we were browsing over a Wi-Fi connection. Luckily no other part of the interface outside the browser seemed to cause such peculiar behavior. In general the BlackBerry OS doesn't have too many shortcomings. The target audience isn't likely to hold the dreary looks of the deeper menu levels against their provider and the unusual options navigation is in fact traditional for the brand and is only new to us, outsiders of the CrackBerry circle. 
The performance is what matters here and the Bold delivers on that excellently. With a faster-paced CPU that the BlackBerry Curve 8900 the Bold's response is more than adequate so this here QWERTY fella won't be discriminated based on its UI. 
Phonebook The phonebook is one part of the interface of the BlackBerry Bold 9000 that won't get a wow for its looks. Being as basic as they get they remind us of older Windows Mobile versions but at least thanks to the virtually unlimited capacity and good organization it gets the job done. Still a new paintjob would have been welcomed and some extra functionality not completely inappropriate. The contacts get listed alphabetically by first, last name or company in one of those black and white lists that we warned you about. You can search a contact by gradually typing the desired name like on almost any other phone, only this time it's much faster and easier with the QWERTY keyboard. 
You can put your contacts in one of two groups - personal and business and then filter your phonebook by that criteria. One contact can belong to both groups so no possible problems here. Editing a contact gives you a vast number of fields which are organized in several sub-groups. You can also replicate some of the fields (those that you are going to need to anyway) as many times as you like. 
Music player Conservative looks and borderline passable functionality is what the BlackBerry Bold 9000 music player is about. The business background of the device is the most probable reason for this and most users wouldn't have expected any different anyway. The music player sorts the music library automatically by artist, album and genre and you can search your tracks by gradual typing. You can also create your own playlists in no time. 
Album art is also supported, but unlike the Curve, this time your are left without the equalizer presets. The other thing we aren't particularly happy about is the fact that there is no Track Repeat option. The only way to make the handset repeat a particular track is to add it to a new playlist and than select repeat. But this probably seems like hairsplitting to most users. 
Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. You can then go back to it via the task manager or through the main menu. There's no indication of the currently playing song on the home screen. Camera We didn’t expect miracles from the camera, but since there was one, we took a closer look. It starts in a second after you press its shortcut and unlike other phones, it will work no matter the menu you’ve been to. The interface is as simple as it can be, with a few icons below the small viewfinder. Point the phone, press the trackball and you’ll see the captured image in a second or so. Press again, wait another second and it is saved. It is fast, but are the photos any good? Not really, even the ones taken during the day look as if taken with the first digital camera to have ever been sold, the shots are blurry and their colors rather washed-out. 
As other 4.6 phones, Bold has central media player, which lets you play and manage music, videos, ringtones, pictures and voice notes. It is good and simple to use, but not overloaded with features. It supports folders, and will sort your music by Artist, Album and Genres. It also supports album art and playlists, which the user can create on the run, the other options are Repeat and Shuffle. What we are really surprised with is the high sound quality coming out the stereo speakers. They will not replace your home stereŠ¾ system, but the sound is decent and pretty loud as well! The 3.5mm jack allows you to connect a good pair of headphones to enjoy your music in really high quality. 
So, this business phone has great music player, now what about its video capabilities? Based on its specs, they must be good as well, supporting DivX, Xvid and H.264 codecs. Our initial tests show that the phone plays them all without a hitch, as long as the width of the resolution doesn´t exceed 640 pixels. Although the screen has only 65k colors you rarely see image artifacts, we only wish it was larger. 
Unfortunately, the 720 pixel width videos played sound only. During the tests we also experienced some problems with the video library: initially all our clips appeared on the list, but later, some of them just vanished, although they were still stored on the memory card. We hit a snag when we tried to fast forward on a clip as well and ended up with sound to video delay of about a second. RIM recommends that the clips are stored in the \home\user\videos folder on the memory card and are up to 480 pixels in width to avoid such problems. Software The Bold has the most powerful processor ever used in a BlackBerry, with a clock rate of 624MHz. In comparison, the Storm runs at 528MHz and the Curve 8900 has a 512MHz unit. As we’ve mentioned earlier, the phone runs pretty fast, yet it could be faster. Unfortunately, Bold has 128MB of RAM (same as the Storm) and not 256MB as the Curve 8900. However, we can’t really say it is a drawback, as despite we were multi-tasking during all tests, we couldn´t manage to slow it down. The only time we had it unresponsive was when we had inserted a full 8GB microSD card for one of the tests. The ‘Berry turned virtually unusable (very slow) and in about 10 minutes we just had to get the card out and “restart” it by removing the battery. 
Bold has got 1GB of internal memory and the card slot allows for up to 16GB of additional storage, which should be about enough for anybody. Like other RIM phones, it comes preloaded with DataViz’s Documents to Go Standard Edition, which adds Word, Excel and Power Point support. It works pretty sweet with both Office 2007 and 2003 documents and we only wish the free version supported PDF as well. Still, it is great that you can at least preview PDF files that are received as email attachments. RIM has packaged four games with the Bold: Word Mole, Sudoki, Klondike (solitaire) and of course the ever-popular Brick Breaker. The high-end BlackBerry of course has an integrated GPS and comes preloaded with BlackBerry Maps applications. We also downloaded Google Maps, which was good as always. Paid apps include Garmin, TeleNav and Trimble and many carriers offer alternatives, such as AT&T’s TeleNav-powered one. 
Other third party applications can also be downloaded fairly easy; among our favorites are Opera Mini, Facebook and Flickr. We´ve downloaded the yet-to-be-released Facebook 1.5 and are impressed by the way it recognizes your phonebook contacts and can assign Facebook pictures to them. There is decent third party support for BlackBerries, but it is not as extensive as the one for Windows Mobile, Palm or the iPhone. GPS Just as the tradition goes, BlackBerry Bold 9000 is equipped with a built-in GPS receiver and comes with A-GPS support. For navigation you get BlackBerry Maps preinstalled. Unfortunately it is yet another application that only works with a BlackBerry internet plan activated. This means that voice-guided navigation is out of the question for the ones that buy it SIM free and then use it with their regular plan. 
BlackBerry Maps provides basic map functionality plus voice-guided navigation. You can enter an address straight from your phonebook and you can also save your favorite spots so you don't have to type them every time. The BlackBerry Maps also allow you to send your location to anyone via email or SMS, and that rounds off a decent but certainly not spectacular application. Conclusion At the end of this review we can confirm our initial observation. The BlackBerry Bold 9000 comes to crown the company efforts in the recent years, coming as close as possible to the ultimate business tool. The handset offers a remarkable display, a great keyboard and an unsurpassed among the family connectivity. We highly doubt that there will be something more that a BlackBerry fan could want, except for maybe the more compact body of the Curve. Outside the BlackBerry world the Bold faces somewhat stronger competition. The Nokia E71 matches its connectivity, still offers a great screen and keyboard and costs about 50 percent less. And it's more compact. In addition it offers a larger choice of 3rd party apps and more stable OS than the Bold. Windows Mobile QWERTY devices such as the Samsung i780, Palm Treo Pro and HP 910c are also having an edge over the Bold for offering a much greater variety of 3rd party applications to choose from - those devices have a more competitive price, as well. While there certainly are a number of apps for the BlackBerry too, they are merely a drop in the bucket compared to the software available for WinMo. Besides, the BlackBerry world is not so hospitable to strangers. There is only point in getting the Bold if you are planning to bet the BlackBerry Internet service, which might be another deal breaker to some. And even with all those remarks in mind the BlackBerry Bold is still worth a look when you are shopping for your next business handset. |
