Blackberry Bold 9780 deals & review

The BlackBerry Bold 9780 takes its design cues from the Bold 9700 released several months earlier, and while it does bring some new things to the table it should be considered as more of an upgrade than a sequel device. The Bold 9700 went down a storm due to its perfect combination of BlackBerry features and the new BlackBerry Bold 9780 has fine-tuned these for greater performance.

Most features contained within the Bold 9780 remain the same as those found in the 9700. The processor remains set at 624MHz and instead the new BlackBerry operating system receives a jolt in performance due to increased memory. This has been increased quite dramatically from 128MB to 4 times its size at 512MB. This memory increase is certainly noticeable when using the phone as, although the original BlackBerry Bold 9700 was by no means sluggish, the more demanding BlackBerry OS 6 installed on the Bold 9780 runs seamlessly and without any hiccups.

BlackBerry OS 6 has had a revamp and has a newly designed interface, as well as improved media player, web browser and greater social networking integration. This is all beautifully shown off on the Bold 9780´s 2.44" TFT screen which has not seen many major changes from the Bold 9700. It still comes with the same colour depth of 65K and sharp resolution of 480 x 360 pixels. This all comes above the iconic BlackBerry QWERTY keypad and optical trackpad that are the primary methods of input for the Bold 9780.

The BlackBerry Bold 9780 has some excellent messaging features under its belt to complement the keypad, including SMS/MMS support, email and instant messaging. The Bold 9780 also features 3G and Wi-Fi connections as well as GPRS, EDGE, microUSB and Bluetooth with A2DP. While the BlackBerry Bold 9700 could only handle 8GB microSD cards to complement its 256MB internal storage, the Bold 9780 can take 32GB cards to go with its 512MB internal memory. A 2GB microSD card is included with the Bold 9780 straight out of the box.

With the new BlackBerry OS 6 there have been changes made to the media player on board the Bold 9780, although it still comes with excellent music and video playback. Unfortunately there is no FM radio present. The camera on the Bold 9780 has also had an upgrade from the 9700, with a new 5 megapixel camera on board. This features an LED flash, video recording and various software features to play around with.

The Bold 9780 has seen noticeable improvements to many areas of its performance, including RAM and internal storage space, an increase in camera pixel count and shiny new operating system. While these offer noticeable improvements many other areas of the phone remain virtually unchanged. Some owners of the Bold 9700 may be tempted to make an upgrade for the slight tweaks but it would be understandable why others would not. For those who do not already own a BlackBerry Bold however, this is an excellent smartphone full of a great range of professional and entertainment features. It does exactly what BlackBerry does best and would be a perfect handset to consider for those looking to give BlackBerry a try.