mobil phone: BlackBerry Bold 9700

Successor of RIM for the Bold original - the BlackBerry Bold 9700 - finally landed on our doorstep. The 9000 is in many ways a difficult act to follow. Hardware-wise, it has lived up to its name, from where most phones have never been with its retro, tough, look almost awkward in an era of rounded edges and curves brilliant. Do not get us wrong - we loved the 9000 aesthetic obsession - which is why we could not wait to get his hands on his newborn child. Some questions that we had in mind: the 9700 would be the height of his predecessor notoriously uncompromising sense of fashion? Would the new Bold also feel good to hold and use the hand as his loving parent? How would it stack up against other new RIM devices? If this is the kind of questions you think you may want answers to, read on for our impressions.

As already mentioned fans, we were serious material elements of the original Bold, and it would be hard enough to find a successor to live up to it. In our case, it really has no close competitors in terms of design of mobile phones and, you know, attitude. What we liked most about aesthetics was his fearless defiance of conventional phone Stylings at the time of its release. Faux leather and chrome edges rather than plastic all combined to produce a phone that was just a little off the beaten track, that felt important in our hands, and finally caught and kept our attention. The 9700 has kept some of these details - there are still bits of chrome and leather here - but it also fell almost thrive on the attitude of the original design. RIM has kicked out the metal around the odd camera on the back, and full-Timey old battery cover leather, for what essentially amounts to a Tour with a trackpad optics. Honestly, we recognize our own personal peculiarities, and I understand that many choices of RIM here for modernization of the aircraft, which we support wholeheartedly. However, we solve also the wish of the designers have been some exciting new ideas to add to Bold - but it seems they did not. The new Bold is all about, well, normalizing the handset and put it in common with other new offerings RIM, has the 8520 or the Tour, as we have previously mentioned.

We do, however, love the smaller, more stylish form factor of the whole package, and the device feels nice in hand. Much more simplified than the one preceding the Bold, the 9700 feels light without feeling too cheap, although it does feel a little less important than older BlackBerrys us. We prefer the leather strap on his back felt over the rubber a little tour, and the volume rocker rubber on the right side is preferable to the change in 9000.



The QWERTY keyboard will be familiar to a Bold (or, more recently, Tower) users, and is worthy of our affection. Typing on it is a joy, and if you've been missing this for a while as we had, it's just like back on a bike ... It all comes back to you, and you're in love again so quickly. However, the 9700 is much smaller than the 9000 or the Tour, and you feel like that. We still have no typos on the keyboard, but we could see more hands, we feel very cramped.

RIM has gone ahead and released its new optical trackpad in 9700, too, and it is a modernization that we can really get behind. Yes, it takes a little practice - but we believe it is a tool far superior to navigation and provides a smoother experience. Regardless of fans, we also wholesale the old ball, but it's probably the right direction for RIM to move its equipment in. While the 9700's other hardware buttons feel good and Clicky, and we have no complaint them.

The screen 480 x 360 on the 9700 is up from the 480 x 320 Bold original, but in practical terms, it seems very much the same - so terribly clear, sharp and beautiful. The colors are bright, but we are hoping for the succession of screen a little more real (which is comparable to the evolution of our experience with the BlackBerry), particularly in the experience more and more sad navigation. I will return in a moment.



The 3.2 megapixel camera (against 2.0 in the original) is significantly improved with more accurate images, and it reacts much faster than the 9000 too. They dropped the digital zoom to 2x digital zoom, which in practice is with us as the extreme zoom always produced rather disappointing results, at least 3x.


This brings us to the performance of the 9700 in terms of user experience. While the processor is clocked at 624MHz the same as its big brother, the 9700 obviously had a bit of sauce under the hood, because without changes to the interface for this device is more flexible overall. Navigation, which has always been fast enough on a BlackBerry, is tightening a bit, and we found that opening a bunch of applications underlined our device much less than the original Bold, which was sometimes tempted to give us time feared. Fortunately, we have not seen much of the old lag here - and the fact that the 9700 comes with BlackBerry OS 5.0 probably helps along a little too. The battery - which says RIM gets about 6 hours of talk time - seems to be a real strong point on the phone, and it is more than enough to go through extensive use of a full day.

Call quality is good and the volume is nice and strong, but we can not but feel the speaker is slightly lower than 9000, but that could just be weakening our ears, of course. RIM says it improves the browser on the new device, and we confess that it is a little faster, but as we said earlier, we are left with the feeling that browsing on a BlackBerry will not be satisfactory until there is a serious updating of software.


And at the end of the day, this is something we can not past - lovers of serious BlackBerry will tell you that the interface is the same, and there are many reasons to get hooked on these devices . For us, however, the BlackBerry interface is worn by time and, ultimately, beautiful hardware aside, this device is essentially exactly the same as any other BlackBerry. Whether it's a good thing or not, we let you decide. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 (as you can see) is headed for T-Mobile by Black Friday, and AT & T variety appear November 22. Both carriers offer the handset for $ 199 with a 2 year contract (AT & T's deal requires a $ 100 mail-in rebate).