BlackBerry Bold 9000 Unlocked Cell Phone Review

Design of BlackBerry Bold 9000
The first time you see the RIM BlackBerry Bold, the words “lustrous” “sexy,” and “fresh” will cross your mind. With 4.5 inches of height, 2.6 inches of wide and 0.6 inch of depth and 4.8 ounces of weight, the Bold is large and broad, making it a little bit tight to be fit in the pants pocket. It doesn’t really look astonishing like the iPhone 3G, but it is not a bad-looking phone either. The black frame and silver border are quite eye-catching and the rounded edges give a modern-look design. Plus, if you twist over the phone, you’ll find that the back side has a leatherette surface (no more polished plastic), giving a high-end look. If you want to modify your device a little bit more, RIM provides replaceable backplates available in many different colors, like blue, gray, and red, that can be purchased for $29.99 each, which we think is a little bit expensive.

In general, the design isn’t that flamboyant, but its real beauty is in the display. The Smartphone pride its self with a 2.75-inch half-VGA, non-touch screen that boasts 65,000 colors at a brittle 480×320-pixel resolution. It can be the best-looking screen that we’ve found on a Smartphone these days.. The iPhone and HTC Touch Diamond can be its contender, but we had a brief comparison between the iPhone and Bold and finally found that the pictures on the Bold appeared a little bit glossier and crisper. The colors pop up on the screen and video playback was extraordinary (much more on the Performance section).

With a gorgeous screen, we are happy to observe that the BlackBerry Bold 9000 Unlocked Cell Phone features the most recent user interface, which is much more similar to the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220. Some new symbols are a quite complicated to identify at a glimpse (e.g., downloads, applications, and settings), but you are scrolling it over, each item has been classified by each of its name along the bottom part. Like always, you are able to modify the home screen with various subjects, setting images, lettering size and type, and backlight brightness and time out.

Beneath the display, there are ordinary navigation controls, which comprise of Talk and End/power keys, a menu shortcut, a back button, and a trackball navigator. One advantage of this phone’s wider size is that these buttons are huge enough and easy to press. The BlackBerry Bold provides a QWERTY keyboard which is the modernized Curve keyboard by RIM, but it might recall us back to the BlackBerry 8830. As we know some 8800 series users had some concerns with the keyboard, but there is no problem found in the Bold. The buttons of keyboard have good sizes and have a nice pleasant sense to them. We could create e-mails and text messages with least mistakes. There is also a backlit to help you typing easily in darker surroundings.

On the left back-side, you will discover a 3.5mm headphone jack, a mini USB port, a customizable shortcut key, and a microSD/SDHC expansion slot. The right side grips the volume rocker and another user-programmable convenience key. There’s a silent button on the peak of the handset, and the camera and flash are positioned on the back.

Features of BlackBerry Bold 9000
The RIM BlackBerry Bold might not just look bold in appearance but also in the features section as well. Let us begin with the first HSDPA handset for the RIM, transporting the data speeds up to network for a broadband connection on the mobile device. There are some factors that impinge on the 3G speeds, like the location you live and the number of people on the network at the same time, but you might look forward for speeds around 400Kbps to 700Kbps (with the potential to hit up to 2Mbps). The Bold holds up the 850/1900/2100 HSDPA/UMTS bands, so the 3G coverage can be discovered in other parts of the globe, even Europe and Asia.

Just a little reminder, RIM mentioned that one of the reasons why it help up for quite sometimes to launch an HSDPA phone to the market is that it wanted to assure that the battery time wouldn’t be given up at the expense, including the use of the 3.5G technology. The RIM also mentioned that another reason of the delay is the accurate 3G testing to avoid the problems that appeared in the iPhone 3G. Until today, we do not find any problems with the 3G coverage, but the test to the phone will still be conducted over the next few weeks (plus on the Performance section as well).

Other features found in the Bold are the quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, conference calling, voice-activated dialing, speed dial, and text and multimedia messaging. The mobile also provides a background noise cancellation technology to increase call quality, and you are able to improve the bass or treble intensity when making or receiving a call. The phone book is limited up to the available memory only(the SIM card provides an extra 250 contacts) with space in each entry for numerous phone numbers, e-mail addresses, work and home addresses, job title, and more. For the purposes of caller ID, you can allocate a photo to a contact and also a group category–business or personal–or one of 32 polyphonic ringtones. Bluetooth 2.0 is available with mono and stereo headsets and hands-free kits. There is a support available for the series of the ort profile and the dial-up networking.

Wi-Fi and GPS are also available to use. The incorporated Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g) can be used as the optional strategy for browsing the Net so you don’t only count on 3G. You are able to add up a network manually or the Smartphone will automatically scan for any available networks; so far we found no problem discovering and connecting to any of available wireless network. Some Wi-Fi tools are also available, such as diagnostics, DNS lookup, and site survey. The BlackBerry browser is usualy left behind in the competition because of its insufficient navigation system, but some efforts for improvements have been made through the year. The Bold provides you with a full HTML Web browser, and various two views can be chosen here, such as Page View or Column View. Furthermore, regarding to zoom in/out functions, you can make use of an onscreen cursor that can be freely move to any direction you desired and put it on any part of the screen where you want to click a link. It’s still not yet perfect and the Web browser is somehow still left behind from iphone 3G, but it is considered better compared to the previous BlackBerry’s.

The GPS is both self-directed and supported, using both satellites and cellular triangulation to locate where your position is. You can obtain maps and text-based, use them in turn for any driving directions with apps like BlackBerry Maps and Google Maps for Mobile, but if you wish to have a real-time tracking and voice-guided instructions, you must apply a location-based service. The BlackBerry Bold is associated to work with AT&T Navigator and AT&T Navigator Global Edition. Recently, there is a program where you might get a 30-day free trial of the service; after that, you must pay for $9.99 per month for unlimited access package or $2.99 for one day package only. You also be alert that data charges apply for everyday information.

The BlackBerry Bold 9000 Unlocked Cell Phone builds with the latest BlackBerry OS 4.6, carrying the up-to-date aforementioned user interface and also the new functionality. E-mail will still certainly be the strength of the BlackBerry Bold. It can be cooperated with the company’s BlackBerry Enterprise server, with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise, to send corporate e-mail in real time. Using BlackBerry Internet Service, you have an option to access up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts. Similar to all newest BlackBerry models, the Bold installs a spell-check feature that can be use to check for any errors in e-mails and memos, but can not be applied for the text messages. The Bold also provies an attachment viewer for opening Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG, GIF, and more.

Closely related to the business focus purpose of the Bold, it’s nice to find that the newest Smartphone now comes equiped with DataViz Documents To Go Standard Edition, so that you are now able to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files as well. If you need the ability to create new documents, you are requested to upgrade it to the Premium Edition. So far, there is no problems opening and operating Word and Excel documents, but we can’texpect doing more than a slightly editing on the Bold or other smartphones for this issue. Other PIM applications also provides a Calendar, a task list, a memo pad, a voice recorder, a calculator, a password keeper, and more.

The BlackBerry Bold has many of multimedia selections, and with the Smartphone’s exceptional display and excellent speaker, we believe that it’s one of the best parts of the phone. The built-in media player are able to play numerous music and video formats, including MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, and MIDI music files, and MPEG4, WMV, DivX4, XviD (partial support), and H.263 video clips. There is a search function, playlist creation, shuffle and repeat, and you have the option of a full-screen mode that can be used for any video playback. The enclosed software CD includes a copy of Roxio Easy Media Creator as well, so you are able to create MP3s from CDs and add audio tags. The Bold also cooperate with the BlackBerry Media Sync application so to load iTunes library is something that you can do with it. The Bold installs 1GB memory and 128MB of flash memory onboard. If you wish for any slot’s expansion, you can upgrade it up to 16GB cards.

The BlackBerry is completed with a 2-megapixel camera with flash, 5x zoom, and video recording. For motionless images, there are some choices of three picture sizes and three picture qualities available to choose. There are settings for white-balancing and color effects that you can insert to the image. Because the presence of the built-in GPS, you are able to geo tag your photos. Talking about the video mode, the options are limited only on three color effects and two video formats (normal and MMS).

Picture quality was quite good. Images are sharp and clear, unfortunately the colors appeared a little bit pale and washed out. Another unfortunate thing is that the video quality wasn’t too satisfying. A bit of pixilation (distracting enough) was found and it was disappointing because any other videos looked great on the Bold. This is all because of the camera quality used.

Performance of BlackBerry Bold 9000
We checked the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900/2000) RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 Cell Phone in San Francisco using AT&T service and the calling quality appeared to be good. Voices produced are clear on the receiver with minimized background noise, and we found no problems at all when using an airline’s voice automated response system. Some other reports are similar to ours. They found good outcome with no significant complaints. The speakerphone was quite good. The sound quality reduced a little bit, but the on conversations could still be carried out just fine. There was no any experience of reception problems or dropped calls when we did the review, but a further test will be continued and any report of up-coming issue will be stated. We successfully join up the Bold with the Logitech Mobile Traveler Bluetooth headset and the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones.

The RIM BlackBerry Bold is installed with a 624MHz Intel PXA270 processor, while the previous BlackBerry’s had only 312MHz processors, so technically speaking, you should be able to enjoy smoother and rapid performance. When we did the test, it is mostly to be true. Only a couple of slight delays were found; for example, the Smartphone needed to think a little bit before starting the function of a slide show. Somehow, the response times were fast for most parts, either operating a Word document or opening the media player.

Web browsing will be the one area that still needs some improvement. The page load speeds were sufficient, whether using 3G or Wi-Fi, but the browser was less desired. There are many changing views and zooming in and out to get to the right part of the page, so it might not like a seamless experience.

The amazing thing is the multimedia performance on the BlackBerry Bold. We were astonished (frankly speaking) by the excellent sound that was produced by the phone’s dual stereo speakers. Nothing is like a full sound from any Smartphone before, giving a pleasant balance of treble and bass, and plenty of volume is available. We were also glad to find a 3.5mm headphone jack built in altogether with 11 equalizer settings to improve the sound. Playing the videos on the Bold is unbelievable. It’s all because of the half-VGA display installed in the Bold..The playback was also unbelievably smooth with hardly any distortion.

The RIM BlackBerry Bold installs a 1,500mAh lithium-ion battery with the approximately talk time of 4.3 hours and up to 10.5 days of standby time. The test has proven this to be true, even it could last for the total of 7 hours time talk on a single charge.

Plus: The RIM BlackBerry Bold prides it self with of the sharpest displays ever found on a Smartphone and gives great multimedia performance. The Smartphone also carries HSDPA support, more productivity devices, and the most recent OS. Other advantages will be Wi-Fi; GPS; Bluetooth; and strong e-mail support with full QWERTY keyboard.

Minus: The Bold is a bit large and pricey. The Web browser is difficult to navigate as the competition.

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