BlackBerry Bold 9780

Editor's Review of the Bold 9780

With such a distinct appearance to the Blackberry Bold 9700, its hard to view the 9780 as a follow-up release. This handset acts as more of an upgrade to its predecessor, although with Blackberry 6 OS onboard, flaunts some impressive new features.

Design & Build

Imagine the Blackberry Bold 9700 without its chrome edging, and you have pretty much visualised the Bold 9780. That's not to say we don't like its design, as both its black and white variants feature a distinct business like feel, and feel extremely solid in your hand. Its leather-like casing gives it a premium touch too. Measuring in at just 109 x 60 x 14 too with a weight of 121g, it's a handset designed for slipping in your pocket.

Of course, The Bold 9780 provides you with a portrait QWERTY keypad, a must-have feature on most Blackberry smartphones. Despite its lack of dedicated full stop key, is extremely easy to use, although those with larger fingers may struggle with the tightly-squeezed together layout.

Alongside the keypad is a 2.44 inch colour display, but we can't help but think that this handset would be benefited from a capacitive screen. After getting our hands on the Blackberry Torch 9800, we really wish the temperamental optical trackpad had been replaced with a full touchscreen, making it easier to navigate around the slick new UI.

OS & Interface

One major difference between the 9780 and 9700 is the addition of Blackberry OS 6, which adds some neat little features to the handset.

The interface is a huge improvement, providing you with an all new Notifications Bar, Social Feed app, Connections Bar, and Universal Search. Social Feeds is our favourite addition, which brings live updates from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace directly to your homescreen, alongside any RSS feeds you have chosen to receive. Having marketed their handsets as communication devices, its nice to see RIM finally jumping on this bandwagon, although we're not convinced it's quite as slick as HTC's FriendStream.

The menus are more aesthetically pleasing too, although how necessary they are, we're not so sure. On the homescreen you are provided with an expandable list of apps, which is extremely slick and quick to respond. However, swipe your optical trackpad and your provided with additional menus, providing you with app categories including; Frequent, Multimedia and Favourites. We're not 100 percent convinced that these are needed, proving hard to navigate and adding unnecessary bulk to the interface.

Multimedia & Storage

It's nice to see that the 3.2 megapixel camera of the Bold 9700 has been upgraded to 5 megapixels, which provides images of a much more impressive quality. The camera reacts well in even the poorest of lighting, and doesn't seem to struggle when shooting footage, either.

With 512MB of storage onboard, you're provided with double the internal capaciy of that found on the 9700. However, in comparison to other modern smartphones, we're a bit disappointed. Nonetheless, this can be upgraded to up to 32GB using microSD, with a 2GB microSD card provided.

The built in media player didn't disappoint, although media enthusiasts may be disheartened by the lack of FM radio, and would appreciate a larger screen.

Everything Else

With Blackberry 6 OS comes an all-new WebKit browser, which is something that Blackberry handsets have needed since day one. When boosted with the handset's 3G and WiFi connectivity, it renders pages quickly, although we were a bit disappointed to discover some pixelation and lag when scrolling. This aside, it's a huge improvement, and you can even bookmark your favourite websites straight to your homescreen, which is handy. With no Flash support onboard, you're unable to stream Flash videos.

We weren't won over by the built-in GPS client, powered by Blackberry Maps. With dull visuals and slow loading speeds, we'd recommend downloading Google Maps.

Conclusion

Although we enjoyed using the Blackberry Bold 9780, we can't quite look past the fact that it is almost identical to its sibling, the 9700. That said, we would recommend this handset over its predecessor, as it offers a much better camera, double the memory and a slick new interface that definitely won us over.