RIM BlackBerry Bold - Review

Phone Arena is testing and reviewing mobile phones for you. This video focus' on the RIM BlackBerry Bold.

Being good and to—only just wont cut it these days, and the all-in-one devices are what most customers are in search of. Research in motion knows this and that is why the Bold is a high-end business phone which also has a nice design and multimedia features. The glossy black plastic on the front goes along perfectly with the fake leather back and silver elements resulting in a really high-end looking smartphone. Although, it is a plastic phone, it doesn’t feel cheap. Have the Bold in hand and your find your thumb right into trackball. It has become a standard feature of the Blackberry phones. And we can not say we don’t like it. New users will feel that it’s a little awkward to use but in a day or two, most of them will love it. The trackball allows for much faster navigation to the desired field when compared to a standard D-pad or joystick. The huge Send menu, Back and End keys are positioned around it. Blackberry’s key feature is email and it requires excellent second to non-keyboard. The four rows have superb separation, thanks to the silver strings but we’re in love with the horizontal key separation, thanks to the unique form of each button. Note how the left half have the right side ward and vice versa. They are easy to press, have a good travel and well pronounced feedback. The 2.6-inch display isn’t small but you know, bigger is better. The—VGA 480x320pixels resolution is also nice, although the Curve 8900 and the Storm has higher resolution screens. Although, a 65000 color screen sounds mediocre, the image quality is good enough. The light sensor is very robust and the display remains visible in almost any condition. None of the side keys gives any trouble. There are Mute button on the top, the Volume Rocker, a convenient shortcut key on the right and another one on the opposite side. The MicroSD slot, Mini USB and 3.5mm jack are all on the left hand side of the phone. The back houses only the camera and its LED flash while the button for releasing the battery cover is on the bottom. We accidentally opened the cover a few times. Like the latest Curve models 8900 T-Mobile and 8350i for Sprint, the Bold runs Blackberry Operating System Version 4.6. It refreshes the overall look with its modern icons and o refine design in line with what’s to be expected in 2009. But once we take a closer look, you’ll find the same old black and white text list. Blackberry users will find themselves right at home and first time users will need some time to get use to it especially if they have to find something that is not in the main menu. There is nothing new in the Phonebook, Organizer or Messaging. As always, these are excellent in a Blackberry. The Bold is the first berry that comes with global 3G. It is a quad-band GSM into tri-band UMTS phone, so fast internet browsing is an option with any GSM 3G carrier around the globe except for T-Mobile USA. In addition, it supports WiFi. The browser may not be perfect but is pretty good. Most pages render very well and pretty fast, thanks to the fact that they are compressed through a server. Unfortunately, in some more complex pages such our homepage, it happened that text overlaps images in some. We didn’t expect miracles from the camera but since there was one, we took a closer look. The interface is as simple as it can be with a few icons below the small viewfinder—phone, press the trackball and you will see the captured image in a second or so. Unfortunately, the photos are not really great and look as if taken with the first digital camera to have ever been sold. The shots are blurry and their colors rather worse out. This other 4.6 phones Bold has a central media player which lets you play and manage Music, Videos, Ringtones, Pictures and Voice Notes. It is good and simple to use but not overloaded with features. What we are really surprised with is the high sound quality coming out off the stereo speakers. They will not replace your home stereo system but the sound is decent and pretty loud as well. The 3.5mm jack allows you to connect a good pair of headphones. Luckily, the video player is also great. It supports DivX, XviD and H.264 in codec videos. And our tests proved that they would play great as long as their resolution is less than 640 pixels inn width. Although the screen has only 65000 colors, you rarely see image artifact. We only wish it was larger. The Bold has the most powerful processor overused in a Blackberry with a clock rate at 624MHz. It runs pretty fast yet it could be faster. The only time we hear it unresponsive was when we had inserted a full 8GB MicroSD card for one of our tests. The—turned virtually unstable, very slow and in about 10 minutes, we just had to get the card out and restart it by removing the battery. As other research in motion phones, it comes preloaded with database, documents to go standard tradition which adds Word, Excel and PowerPoint support. It works pretty sweet with Bold Office 2007 and 2003 documents. And we only wish the free version support at PDF as well. Still, it is great that you can at least preview PDF files that are received as email attachments. Of course, the high-end Blackberry has an integrated GPS and it comes preloaded with Blackberry maps applications. We also downloaded Google Maps which was good as always. Paid apps include Garmin, TeleNav and—and to many carriers offers alternative such as AT&T TeleNav part one. Other third party applications can be downloaded also. Our favorites includes Facebook and Flickr. The Bold is a great looking device with good functionality but is a good phone as well. Nobody would talk to it, has complaint about a sound quality and the incoming sound quality was great also. We were happy to see that the speaker phone is very good. Blackberry rates the battery at five hours talk time and 13 days standby. In real life, we got an average of two to three days between consecutive charge ups—it show, we do like the Bold. If you’re looking for a Blackberry phone, this one is probably the best you can get. With great business and good multimedia features. However, unless you typically wear suits and not pajamas, you should take a look at the more affordable Curve Series or the Storm with its huge touch screen. If you like the leather, keep in mind that it may turn out not to be your cup of tea if you’re into heavy typing. Thanks for watching.