Blackberry Bold 9700 Review

The Blackberry Bold 9700 is a well-built phone with a solid feel. Unlike many phones on the market, there can be little doubt that the 9700 will still be fully functional two, three or even four years down the line.

It is much more compact than its predecessor(the 9000) and the full qwerty keyboard has been squeezed into the available space. The keys are small, but are well designed. In spite of the size it is simple to type accurately.

The other Blackberry features include the leather back and the carry case that provides protection.

Call quality is better than many of the phone's competitors. Many phones are feature rich but fail on the fundamental function.

The phone comes with a 2 GB memory card providing enough space to store a reasonable amount of music. This can be upgraded to 16 GB. It falls short of the Nokia 5800 with a standard 8 GB, and the Nokia X6 with 32 GB internal memory. The sound quality is quite good, matching much of the competition and the handset is equipped with a choice of preset equaliser settings that only seem to work when connected to the headset.

The headset supplied with the phone is reasonable good producing somewhat better sound than the speakers. The headset can be connected when the phone is in the holster as can the USB cable.

Of course one of the main advantages of the Blackberry is to get the Blackberry Internet Service that allows you to receive all your emails and use the Internet at no additional cost.

Every email that arrives is accompanied by a vibration. SMSs are grouped according to where they come from.

Many smart phones come ready equipped with GPS but most do not include a licence for navigation software. The 9700 has two applications to fill the purpose. Blackberry Maps Garmaps for Mobile. Garmaps includes voice navigation, traffic condition notifications and notifications of speed cameras. It works well but is rather slow to load.

Blackberry Maps failed to locate a street address but managed to do so under advanced search.

The display on the unit is clear providing excellent visibility even in the sun. The orientation is landscape which works quite well for most applications. The device is DivX compatible and will play most videos well.

The Blackberry Browser makes it simple to navigate the Web. The home site is (not surprisingly) Blackberry. Various downloads are offered including a U2 album. Unfortunately, this download results in a response that the device is not compatible. Then there are a range of Blackberry Applications to be downloaded - many for free.

Opera Mini 5 beta 2 for Blackberry works well on the phone providing a good alternative to the very adequate Blackberry Browser.

The camera is disappointing. It offers 3.2 megapixel resolution that should be able to deliver decent results. But it is outclassed by the Nokia 5800 with the same resolution. Apart from the ability to Geotag the photos and the simplicity of zooming in and out, the camera does not offer much else. I attempted a night shot of an accident scene but could not frame the picture in the dark. With the competition offering up to 12 Mega Pixels (the Sony Ericsson Satio, for example), RIM should have upped the quality and capability of the camera.

The track pad is one of the nice features of the phone. It allows for easy scrolling through pictures, documents, emails and the Web.

The office applications loaded onto the phone make it possible to view and edit MS office documents - Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Many competitors include a view-only licence.

The operating system is so last-century! There are text menus everywhere. The first click of the menu button returns an array of poorly designed icons that take you to the next level of menu options. After that, all menus are in text style. The options are not very extensive either. A throw-back to Dos or Windows for Workgroups 3.11 if anyone can remember that far back.

The other main problem is the Desktop Manager application for the computer. It allows you to sync music using iTunes or Windows Media Player. But trying to download a single song is quite problematic. Nokia has a simple drag and drop process for file transfer. Nothing close to that here. While you can charge the phone using the USB connection to your computer, you cannot access any media files while the phone is connected. Apart from that, the application keeps freezing. It is faster and simpler to use Windows Explorer to transfer files.

Connecting using the micro USB allows the phone to charge from your computer. A very useful feature that frees you from carrying a charger at all times. The charger that is supplied with the phone is ideal for travel and includes an adapter for every type of electrical connection.

Battery life is excellent. After a day of full use that included much listening to music, using the GPS, many calls and Internet browsing, there was still plenty of battery power to last through the next day.

The Blackberry 9700 is quite different from most other smart-phones on the market. The big selling points are the reputation that has been acquired for the phones, Blackberry Messenger and the Blackberry Internet and Enterprise services (BIS & BES). The finish is good and feels like a quality product. The email handling is great. The main disappointments are the operating system and the camera. The menu driven system is clunky and long-winded, neither intuitive or user friendly.

Without the BIS, the Blackberry falls short of the competition in this price range. Perhaps RIM should take serious note of the competition that has emerged at this end of the market before its next release. The Blackberry 9700 has the newly upgraded Blackberry operating system 5. This falls far short of the Windows Mobile and Symbian systems available.