BlackBerry Bold Review

Introduction/Design:

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.



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.




You can compare the RIM BlackBerry Bold with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

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.

Interface

Like the latest Curve models (8900 for T-Mobile and 8350i for Sprint), the Bold runs BlackBerry OS version 4.6. It refreshes the overall look with its modern icons and refined design in line with what´s to be expected in  2009, but once you take a closer look, you’ll find the same old black and white text lists. BlackBerry users will find themselves right at home and first time users will need some time to get used to it, especially if they have to find something that is not in the main menu. The latter is once again visualized as a 6x3 grid, but thanks to the trackball it is easy to zero in on the position you need. Still, in order to keep the most used icons just a scroll away, you can rearrange them. Moving through the menus is pretty quick and you’ll rarely notice a lag – well done, RIM.

Phonebook

There isn’t anything trailblazing about the phonebook and that is a good thing.  It’s as simple and straightforward as ever, and you can store virtually an unlimited number of contacts.  Each contact can hold three email addresses, two work phone numbers, two home numbers, a mobile, pager, fax and “other” number as well as a space for a BlackBerry PIN number.  There are a slots for ahome and work address, anniversaries and birthdays. Contacts can be sorted by user definable categories, whereas each single entry can be assigned a custom ringer and picture ID, plus there is a section for a webpage and notes.



Users can perform searches directly from the main screen by typing in either the first or last name, and as you type a number in the phone application, the Bold matches it against the contact list entries. When an entry in the main contacts view is highlighted, the user can hit the send button to dial the contact and if an entry happens to have multiple numbers assigned to it, a popup window is called up that allows you to pick out the number you want to dial.

Voice dialing is handled by Nuance (formally VoiceSignal) and is excellent.  The left convenience key is preprogrammed to activate it, but this can be changed.

Organizer

Again, nothing new here.  Like the phonebook, the calendar function is very powerful. It can be managed on either your phone or PC, and if paired with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), it can be remotely managed and synced over the air. Creating an appointment is simple, and options such as reminders and event recurrence are present. Appointments can also be marked as private for added security. Other basic PIM functions are available as well, such as Tasks and a Memo Pad. Tasks has rather basic implementation, but reminders can be set and grouped into categories. The Memo Pad is a basic notepad, no bells or whistles. A Voice Note Recorder is at hand for taking notes on the go, and a basic calculator is also available. The Password Keeper does what its name suggests and is something we would use, unlike the coded messages on Sony Ericsson phones.

Messaging

As we’ve already mentioned, just like any BlackBerry, the Bold is a phone designed with extensive messaging in mind. It is not only its SMS and MMS capabilities, but also the excellent push email client and support for BlackBerry PIN messaging that grip attention.  Our unit came preloaded with BlackBerry Messenger, GTalk, and Yahoo Messenger, but AIM, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ can be downloaded from the official BlackBerry site if you feel like keeping in touch with your friends.



Email setup on the BlackBerry is about as perfect as it gets, you simply need to put in your email and password and this is it. We didn’t  even need to enter any server information to get things running with our peculiar work email address. The push email arrived nearly instantaneously during our testing. Users can have up to 10 email addresses on a single device using BlackBerry Internet Service.



Connectivity and Data

The Bold is the first ‘Berry that comes with global 3G support. It is a quad-band GSM and a tri-band UMTS phone, so fast Internet browsing is an option  with any GSM 3G carrier around the globe, except for T-Mobile USA. In addition, it supports Wi-Fi so you can surf the Internet if a wireless hot spot is within range. The phone supports Bluetooth 2.0 and a number of various profiles are available, to exchange files and listen to stereo music wirelessly among the many.

The browser may not be perfect but is quite good. It looks similar to the old one, but incorporates some improvements that definitely lead to a better customer experience.  For starters, the standard mouse cursor has been replaced with an eyeglass and you can zoom in on things by simply pressing the trackball.  Most pages render very well and pretty fast, thanks to the fact that they are processed (compressed) through a server. Unfortunately, in the case of more complex pages (such as our home page) overlapping of text and images may occur. Still, we are very happy with the browser as a whole.


As always, BlackBerry Desktop Manager handles desktop sync.  It is used to manage calendar, tasks, contacts and email synchronization with your desktop.  You can also use the data cable to load media onto the memory card, and Media Sync allows iTunes syncing of non-DRM files, as we’ve seen with other recent BlackBerries.

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 stereо 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.

Performance:

The Bold is a great looking device with good functionality, but is it a good performer as well? We believe it is – nobody has complained about the sound quality when we talked on it and we are happy to see that the speakerphone is excellent. The incoming sound quality is great as well and most of the time loud enough, so you´d rarely put it at the maximum setting.

BlackBerry rates the battery at 5 hours talk time and 13 days standby. In real life, we got an average of two to three days between consecutive charge-ups which wasn’t really bad at all for a smart phone, yet it could have been better.

Conclusion:

In a nutshell, we do like the Bold. If you are looking for a BlackBerry phone, this one is probably the best you can get, with great business and good multimedia features. However, unless you typically wear suits and not pajamas, you should take a look at the more affordable Curve series or the Storm with its huge touch screen. If you like the latter, keep in mind it may turn out not to be your cup of tea if you´re into heavy typing.