Is The Blackberry Bold 9900 Worth The Money?

For the pleasure of getting your hands on RIM's 'thinnest and most powerful smartphone yet' you'll have to cough up £499.95, or sign up for a 2-year-long £31 contract - which works out at £744 altogether.

So, is the BlackBerry Bold 9900 worth almost 750 of your hard-earned pounds?

For the BlackBerry faithful, £744 may seem like a small price to pay for the handset's long-awaited form-factor. The Bold 9900 is the first BlackBerry Bold to sport a touch-and-type form-factor, coupling a 2.8-inch (6480 x 480) capacitive touchscreen with a portrait QWERTY keypad.

However, when compared to the likes of the similarly specced Samsung Galaxy Pro and Orange Barcelona, which cost £185 and £99, respectively, it seems like the handset costs over the odds - even with its intuitive new form-factor. However, this is arguably justified by the rest the handset's specs, which has already won the it excellent reviews.

First off, the Bold 9900 is the thinnest BlackBerry to date, measuring in at 10.5mm thick. It's also been crafted from a steel frame and an glass weave battery cover - which makes this more 'luxurious' than its comparatively specced Android rivals.

According to Engadget's early hands-on review, the BlackBerry Bold 9900 "looks premium and feels lovely in the hand, and the keyboard is typical BlackBerry -- which is to say fantastic."

Within its all-new casing sits a brand-new processor too, clocking in at 1.2GHz. This offers double the horsepower of its Bold 9780 predecessor, making it much more suited to multitasking, gaming and firing up apps - which sort-of goes part way to explaining the handset's price bump.

Adding to the handset's new-found speed is the inclusion of Research In Motion's all-new BlackBerry OS 7 - the latest version of the firm's running system. With this revamped platform onboard, adopters of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 can look forward to a bunch of new features, including' a '40 percent faster' web voice-activated universal search, enhanced GPS, and support for augmented reality applications. For those who are keen to get their hands on BlackBerry OS 7 £700 may seem like a small price to pay, as the platform won't be supported on RIM's older BlackBerry handsets.

Media-enthusiasts may be keen to fork-out for the smartphone, too. It's the first BlackBerry handset to come equipped with 720p HD video capture, shot by the handset's 'enhanced' 5 megapixel camera which also offers 'superior image quality'.

As will those keen to get on board with mobile payments, as the Bold 9900 comes equipped with NFC integration, which will enable the handset to work in a similar way to an Oyster Card. Research In Motion seem pretty excited about it, too, saying: "Through NFC, users will be able to, for example, pair the BlackBerry Bold to an accessory or read information such as a web link from smart tags by simply tapping their BlackBerry Bold to an NFC tag."

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 may seem expensive, but given the handset's high-end specs, it's surely the ultimate upgrade for the BlackBerry faithful.