Although it is nothing short of a mobile powerhouse, it doesn't fit particularly snugly in the hand, making you feel like you're holding a TV remote control to your head every time a call comes in.
Enter the Bold 9700, an updated version of the flagship handset that shrinks everything down to a pretty impressive 109x60x14 mm.
Although the Bold isn't the lightest smartphone around at 122g, it's pretty close to the Curve 8900's weight of 120g, What is responsible for that extra weight? Connectivity.
There's nothing out of place in terms of connecting to the internet, GPS or anything for that matter.
With Wi-Fi standards a, b and g all present and correct, plus HSDPA (tri-band), you can get on the net or send and receive emails almost wherever you are. The Curve 8900 didn't include 3G, let alone HSDPA.
The Bold 9700 does take some design aspects from its older sibling, even though it's all on a smaller scale. There's the faux leather touches on
the rear back plate and the beautiful keyboard is still present and correct.
It would have been a real shame if RIM had disposed of this, because although it's slightly smaller than its predecessor's, it's equally as easy to use whether you have chunky digits or dainty tips.
The angular keys ensure you never lose grip on the key and inadvertently tap the neighboring letter, which is always a bonus in our opinion.
What isn't so well thought out on the Bold 9700 is the angled top, which hosts the mute and lock keys.
You won't feel the buttons depress under your touch which can be misleading - even though they're meant to be invisible, it's nice to get some feedback when you press a button.
A major plus point in our opinion is the return of the touchpad, as seen on the more budget Curve 8520.
It replaces the trackball or 'pearl', as seen on the Pearl, previous Bold and selected Curve handsets.
Unlike the trackball, you won't find bits of fluff or dirt burrowing inside the pearl's cradle making it nigh on impossible to move around menus.
The optical track pad on the Bold 9700 is perfect for every operation, whether you're navigating through menus or navigating the web. A quick swipe on it will move you around pages seamlessly. A tap will select items.
Talking of the browser, this is where we see issues.
Although the OS of the Bold 9700 has been updated - to version 5.0 - the browser is still where it was (and should have been left) in version 4.0.
There's no tabbed browsing, no support for flash, and no easy way for zooming in and zooming out.
This means you will have to install Opera when you first get the device if you're a serial browser.
And onto that screen, it may be slightly smaller than on the Bold 9000, but oh, is it beautiful. RiM has upgraded the resolution to 480x360 pixels which some may think is pointless. A quick comparison between the original Bold and Bold 9700 would make those people regret their words.
It really is that much better to the naked eye. Everything about it is crisp and bright and you won't even notice that it is in fact smaller.
The new OS 5.0 has many an advantage over previous incarnations. Messaging is clearer, with a new threaded messaging system that allows you to view text conversations with friends in Technicolor. Your texts are in one colour, your contacts are in another.
When you want to add a response, your text appears in the bottom strip. This does become a bit of a nightmare though because you can only see one line of your response at a time rather than the whole chunk of text you're currently writing.
When is comes to speed, the Bold 9700 wins in that arena too. It's powered by a 624 MHz processor and that simply zips along at lightening fast speed, however many applications you have running at any one time. We tested the smartphone running six apps - four third party and two preinstalled. There were no pauses and slips and swapping between them was seamless.
The only thing you will have to reserve patience for is booting up the device.
We had to wait at least a minute to see the home screen from start up, which was particularly irritating as we needed to make an urgent call.
As is pretty much the norm with BlackBerrys, the Bold 9700 comes with a selection of preinstalled applications, including the standard Docs to Go (you'll have to pay to upgrade so you can create new documents), a full suite of IM apps, BlackBerry Maps, plus download links for Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and other social networking apps that you may want to use.
For extra apps, the latest version of App World is preinstalled, allowing you to install apps until your heart's content (or you fill up the rather feeble 256MB internal storage).
Thankfully, there is space for a microSD storage card for bumping up that memory.
Multimedia-wise, the Bold 9700 is average BlackBerry fare. The camera is 3.2-mega pixel and features autofocus and flash, while a 3.5mm
headphone jack ensures you can listen to tunes using your own earphones.
A new innovative media menu allows you to flick between video viewing and recording, pictures, voice notes and voice note recording in one place, cutting time whenever you need to find that all-important footage of the night before.
Battery life is a definite plus point with the BlackBerry Bold 9700.
We found the standby time to be dire on the Bold 9000, but the juice on the upgrade saw us going for three days without charge, sending and receiving emails, searching for signal, with Wi-Fi activated. We even used GPS and a Bluetooth headset for short periods of time.
Although there's no capacious internal memory on the 9700 as there was on the original Bold, it will support microSD cards up to 16GB, allowing you to pack in all your multimedia files and applications too.
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is RIM's best all-rounder to date. It's a small package, with everything you could possibly want from a phone. It seems RIM has taken something spectacular (the Bold 9000), and made it even better.
No comments:
Post a Comment