BlackBerry Bold 9900

Editor's Review of the Bold 9900

With the BlackBerry Bold 9900, RIM has finally delved into cutting-edge tech, offering-up a 1.2GHz processor, a high-resolution touchscreen, and the latest version of its home-grown OS: BB OS7. However, with competition from Android and iOS growing ever fiercer, can the Bold 9900 still manage to compete?

Design & Build

At just 10mm thick the Bold 9900 is RIM's thinnest handset to date, and thanks to its new 'luxurious' exterior, it's arguably the firm's best-looking, too. Although it keeps the classic 'business-focussed' styling of your typical BlackBerry smartphone, the 9900's chrome-edged sides and high-gloss glass-weave backplate both exudes high-end class and feels comfortable in the hand.

The first thing you'll notice about the Bold 9900 however, is its 2.8-inch TFT LCD touchscreen. This boasts a 640 x 480 pixel resolution, and icons are noticeably more brighter than on previous BlackBerry models. In fact, given the handset's smaller screen size, we'd say it's almost on par with Apple's Retina Display.

As you'd expect from a BlackBerry Bold handset, this touchscreen comes coupled with a portrait QWERTY keypad. Each button on the keypad is crafted with a slight bump, which makes gripping the keys easy and bashing-out emails super-fast. There's also a backlight hidden behind the rows of tactile keys, which makes using the phone easy in poorly-lit conditions.

With a 1.2GHz processor under the hood, the Bold 9900 feels very fast, too - whether you're scrolling through web pages or firing open apps. This sits alongside the phone's integrated NFC technology - although given the lack of compatible gadgets - we're yet to give this a thorough testing.

OS & Interface

The Bold 9900 is one of the first BlackBerry devices to run on RIM's much-hyped new operating system: BlackBerry OS 7. This delivers all-new colourful icons. a much-needed speed boost, and novel slick transitions as you swipe through its home screens. Saying that, however, the updated platform is by no means revolutionary, as it delivers the same over-complicated menus and a lack of functional personalisation options as previous BlackBerry models.

That doesn't mean it's not user friendly, as the Social Feeds app proved just as functional as usual; grabbing updates from Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds and dropping them straight on your home screen. However, it's by no means as 'pretty' as HTC's FriendStream alternative, and felt a little cluttered on the 2.8-inch touchscreen.

RIM may have 'revolutionised' the look of the BlackBerry Bold, but the same can't be said about BlackBerry App World. Although BlackBerry handsets are traditionally targeted at corporate users with its advanced email features and task management tools, we can't help but think that's simply not enough to fight off RIM's stiff competition from iOS and Android.

Multimedia & Storage

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is the first of RIM's handsets to come with HD video, sporting a 5 megapixel 720p camera with LED flash. In well lit surroundings, photos appeared crisp and detailed - although the quality struggled to match up in more gloomy conditions. We were impressed with the HD video, though, with the handset managing to capture smooth, crisp footage. Another neat features if the ability to upload snapshots directly to Facebook from the Photos application, which will no doubt appeal to RIM's social target audience.

Although not a phone focussed on multimedia, we were equally impressed with the 9900's music player. There's a bunch of features included for altering the sound to cater to your music, and the onboard speakers proved surprisingly powerful. Sound was much more impressive when paired with some decent speakers, though.

Everything Else

According to the Canadian phone-maker, one of the major pulls of BlackBerry OS 7 is its bumped up web browsing capabilities - and it looks like they were right. With HSDPA and WiFi connectivity onboard - paired with that 1.2GHz chipset - pages load extremely quickly, and look pretty fantastic on the high-res screen.

One downside though, is the handset's lack of Flash support, which with the effect of restricting online video choice, could well sway potential punters.

Still, hopefully that can be rectified with its typically epic battery life, right? Well, maybe not. the Bold 9900 comes packing a 1230mAh juice-box, less than the 1500mAh effort which came with the original Bold 9000. However, the battery managed to cope a full day of heavy usage - including surfing the web, watching videos and firing-off emails - which is fairly respectable for such a highly-specced smartphone.

Conclusion

There's no doubting that the BlackBerry Bold 9900 fails in may areas, but it's undoubtedly RIM's greatest achievement to date. With its faster processor and high-res touchscreen the phone ultimately managed to impress, and it's well worth an upgrade for existing BlackBerry users.

Review model provided by Clove