BlackBerry Bold (9000) Review

Getting email on the move is all the rage these days. As Nokia ships the E71, Apple is hoping to get in with the corporates with the iPhone, thanks to its newly added support for push email.
While I’ve got no doubt people would love an iPhone as a work device, or an E71 for its slimness, I’m not sure Research In Motion (RIM) needs to panic just yet.

The company that rules the roost in the mobile email market cannot rest on its laurels, however. While the current BlackBerry range is perfectly functional, the Bold is a big step forward.

The Bold is a more than a Curve with a 3G chipset. The obvious difference is the size; it’s quite a bit bigger. It’s more like the bulky 8800, although considerably better looking and sporting a leather-feel back cover to give it style. The display has been enhanced with a half-VGA resolution screen that matches that of the iPhone (480x320 pixels), but with the smaller physical size it looks even more crisp. In fact, it’s the high contrast, extra bright, screen that gets the device the ‘Bold’ name.

It does email too, you know

Since the introduction of the Pearl, RIM has been keen to promote more than email. If anything, recent campaigns have pushed everything but email. It’s all part of a strategy to make BlackBerrys appeal to a wider audience. It’s a move that seems to have been working, with the Bold sure to convince the remaining doubters.

As soon as you install a decent capacity memory card and transfer some music (you can even take music from iTunes), pictures or video, the Bold becomes a powerful media player. Besides the gorgeous screen, there’s an internal speaker that is extremely clear and loud. It might be designed first and foremost as a speaker phone, but it works just as well for music and video.

You also get a Facebook client, which allows the easy uploading of pictures. You can either upload photos from the device, or take new pictures with the integrated camera. Like the iPhone, the 2-megapixel sensor isn’t going to blow you away, but it’s functional. You can now capture video too.

The web browser benefits hugely from the new screen, and you can switch between desktop and single column views. Some pages fail to render properly and there can also be unexpected delays when accessing some dynamic sites. This is mildly irritating, but not common enough to be a deal breaker.

Fortunately, the handling of email is rock solid. There’s one reason why the BlackBerry is synonymous with mobile email and that’s because it just works. Setting up a new account via the device, or ideally the web, is about as simple as it could be. When you start to receive your mail, you’ll also notice that rich text/HTML emails are now displayed instead of plain text.

The larger display also makes it possible to fit more text on screen, and you can change the font type and size to suit your preferences. Further customisation comes in the form of selecting a one or two line view, so you can have the first line of text shown, or more emails.

When you enter text, the BlackBerry input comes into its own. Besides the nicely sized keys, sentences are finished by double tapping the space bar (inserting a full stop and capitalising the first letter) and punctuation is inserted automatically. It’s not new, but it’s still unbeaten by the competition. It’s a shame that full stops and commas aren’t given their own key, but you’ll soon be typing quickly and wondering why anyone would prefer the Pearl’s SureType system.

Another new feature is the standby clock, with a bedside mode that stops the LED flashing. Some might see it as a gimmick, but when the optional dock is released, it could actually prove to be extremely popular. The alarm can be set with ease, with adjustable snooze times and alerts.

With the mix of 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS, the battery has been boosted in size to cope. If you decide to use your Bold to watch loads of movies, it’s going to struggle to last a full day, but for normal business use it happily lasts for a few days. Not quite like the good old days where you could charge weekly, but still quite impressive.
All things considered, the Bold is the ultimate BlackBerry, although the web browser will hopefully be fixed in a future firmware update.

Every BlackBerry user that saw the Bold fell in love with it, so RIM shouldn’t worry too much about new customers, but on having enough stock for the upgraders.

There’s just one slight issue that I have with the Bold, and that’s the size and its use as an ordinary phone. To me, the Bold has returned to being a secondary device, where you keep a separate phone for voice calls, reserving the BlackBerry for email, web, GPS navigation and so on.

Research In Motion has now announced their first flip-phone BlackBerry, the 8220, but it uses SureType and loses 3G, so if you want a device with a huge screen and a near perfect keyboard, there’s just one answer; the Bold.

VERDICT

The latest addition to the BlackBerry family is by far the most impressive email device we’ve seen for a long time. While the Nokia E71 has the power of Series 60 behind it, with plenty of choice when it comes to additional applications and features, the Bold is self-contained.

That isn’t a bad thing though, as it has everything you need for work, plus a media player that really puts the awesome half VGA screen to good use. The device is a little big though, and you may want to keep a separate phone for voice calling. The browser software is also in need of an update to iron out bugs.

RATINGS (OUT OF 5)

PERFORMANCE: 4
FEATURES: 4
USABILITY: 5
OVERALL: 4