Posts Tagged ‘bold’
BlackBerry Bold 9000 Review
The New Definition of Professional Looking
RIM has dramatically improved the looks of its devices in recent years, and the Bold is a new high point. Its rounded corners and leather-textured back make it somehow both professional and sexy.
And the higher-resolution screen is great, too. The Bold has a 320-by-480-pixel display, which is at least twice the resolution of the earlier RIM models, like the Curve. This is a beautiful screen that makes everything you do with the Bold look great, but especially watching movies.
This smartphone is wider than many of its competitors, but it’s also relatively thin. And its width allows the aforementioned screen to be larger, and also makes room for a bigger keyboard. This isn’t as wide as the landscape-oriented keyboards you’ll find on some smartphones, but it’s large enough to be comfortable to type on. There’s no separation between keys, but each key has a raised area that makes it easier for you to be sure you’re hitting just one at a time. Sadly, the Bold doesn’t fix one of my biggest complaints with BlackBerry keyboards: there are no keys dedicated to the most frequently used punctuation marks, including the period and the comma.
Between the screen and keyboard is the trackball. As the Bold doesn’t have a touchscreen, you’ll do much of your interacting with it through this, and it’s up to the job. After a couple of days of use, I began to think that a trackball is a better option than a D-pad and definitely superior to the old BlackBerry track-wheel.
There are programmable keys on both the left and right sides of this device, which is another thing I’d like to see on other smartphones.
There’s also a button on top you can use to mute incoming calls. This doesn’t answer the call or send it to voice-mail, it just quickly shuts off the ringing sound. You can use this same button to put the Bold in standby mode, which locks the keys and turns the screen off until you hit this button again. It will still take calls, so it’s a good way to carry your smartphone around.
HSDPA, At Last
The BlackBerry Bold is the first model from RIM with HSDPA, the latest version of high-speed wireless networking used by GSM carriers. This is welcome news for AT&T customers, but isn’t going to impress Verizon or Sprint users, as their BlackBerries have had equivalent data transfer speeds for a long time. But like I said, AT&T customers are going to enjoy a noticeable speed increase when accessing web sites.
And the Bold’s web browser is a pleasant surprise. I’ve used some miserable browsers on BlackBerries over the years, but this one is significantly improved. It’s not amazing or even cutting edge by any stretch, but it’s more usable than the browser on any BlackBerry I’ve seen before.
This smartphone is also one of the first from this company with Wi-Fi, which can be used to speed up your browsing when you’re in range of a hotspot.
It also has Bluetooth. This is primarily intended to let you use wireless headsets and car-kits, and it does this job nicely For any of you who aren’t familiar with this term, it refers to the ability to make your phone act as a wireless modem for another computer.
What separates a smartphone from an ordinary mobile phone is good software. Fortunately, the BlackBerry Bold is well supplied with this.
Like all RIM’s models. this device supports push email. Messages can come from a company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server, but AT&T also offers a version of this service for consumers, too.
One of the best new features is the bundled version of DataViz Documents To Go. This is a suite of applications for working with Microsoft Office files. It does a decent job of letting you see files in their original format, and edit them, too. It doesn’t support all the formatting options Word does, but if you edit and re-save a document with formatting DocsToGo can’t display, the unsupported formatting won’t be affected.