RIM Blackberry Bold 9000
The Blackberry Bold is a great handset to use. It’s a little on the large side but the build quality is obvious as soon as you pick it up. The use of 3G is a welcome addition allowing for a much better browsing experience.
With features such as Blackberry messenger, sat nav and DivX loaded the Bold shows that Blackberry are no longer only email devices.
Construction and Build:
The Bold feels like an exceptionally sturdy handset. One of the Blackberry reps even showed just how sturdy the Bold is by throwing it across the room. It didn’t suffer in the slightest!
The trademark Blackberry rollerball is still on board. This really comes in handy when browsing the web allowing for you to scroll using a mouse pointer on screen which is controlled via the rollerball.
Also onboard you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack, perfect for all that mp3 you’ll want to load onto the device. Also there is a dedicated camera shutter key which comes in very handy when capturing photos!
The screen is very good quality. The picture clarity is exceptionally good and watching video on the device is actually quite enjoyable because of this.
Camera:
The camera performs well for a smartphone. It’s nothing special and does what you’d expect. You can capture some decent enough snaps and the LED flash and autofocus camera really help out but at the end of the day you’re not buying a Blackberry for the camera.
Other Features:
One thing that I think is definitely worth mentioning is the Push email service. If you’ve owned a Blackberry before then you will already be familiar with this but if not then read on!
The push email supports up to 10 accounts, pushing email onto your device as soon as they are received by the server. This is absolutely superb and I have still not found any device that supports email as well as Blackberry do.
The only major downside with this is that on the 8900 you must have a blackberry subscription on your account in order to use any email at all. This is a nuisance and can often get pricing depending on what your network charge for the privilege.
Conclusion:
This is definitely worth considering if you need the smartphone functions this phone offers, especially if email is your top priority. The only problem is the size will most likely be a put off at first.
I honestly prefer the smaller Blackberry, the 8900, which offers pretty much the same functionality. At the end of the day RIM are great for compressing data so you don’t always need the 3G networks.
All in all though this is a very good device with tons of functionality. I would definitely recommend this on your maybe list.
Advantages:
- 2.6" 65K-color TFT landscape display with a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels
- Comfortable four-row full QWERTY keyboard
- Quad-band GSM support and tri-band 3G with HSDPA
- Wi-Fi and built-in GPS and BlackBerry maps preloaded
- 2 megapixel camera, LED flash
- 624 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM
- BlackBerry OS v4.6
- Responsive trackball navigation
- Hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 8GB)
- Excellent build quality
- DivX and XviD video support
- Good web browser
- Office document editor
- 3.5 mm audio jack
- Nice audio quality
- Smart dialing
Disadvantages
- No email support without BlackBerry Internet Service account
- Mediocre camera
- No FM radio
- The web browser is unstable when browsing through Wi-Fi
- No video-call camera