Blackberry Bold 9900 deals & review

RIM are the company that produce BlackBerry phones and aside from a few deviations here and there they have typically stuck to a rather formulaic phone design, with a smaller screen above a condensed QWERTY keypad. This is a design that has often been imitated by other manufacturers but one that the majority of people will instinctively associated with the Canadian company. RIM have ventured into full touchscreen territory with phones like the BlackBerry Storm although the SurePress screen technology that was employed in that phone met with mixed responses.

Touchscreen

The Bold 9900 adopts a more conventional capacitive touchscreen system and at the same time sticks to the popular BlackBerry design, complete with QWERTY keyboard and optical trackpad. There are some critics of this choice of design who will say that touch sensitive phones need to have larger screens (3.5" – 4.5") to fully make use of the touchscreen features on board and that touch sensitivity is not really suited to a smaller screen like the 2.8" display found on the Bold 9900.

While there may be some truth to this argument in respect to features like touchscreen games, the touch sensitivity on the Bold 9900 does provide a very welcomed means of navigating your way through the interface. The Bold 9900 is the first RIM phone to come with the new BlackBerry OS 7, which was supposed to be BlackBerry OS 6.1 but was felt to feature significant enough changes to warrant a whole integral increase in its number convention.

BlackBerry OS 7

The new OS offers a more enjoyable experience to earlier versions of the RIM operating system, and features new Liquid Graphics. Liquid Graphics helps to render graphics much faster and helps to provide a smoother and more seamless experience when using features like panning and zooming through the interface.

The interface does seem a great deal nippier than earlier BlackBerry phones and the OS tweaks are no doubt enhanced by the faster 1.2GHz processor in use. BlackBerry OS 7 also comes with some other new additions including BlackBerry Balance. As a large number of people who use BlackBerry phones are professionals this is an excellent feature to have included, as it allows you to separate your work and your personal content on the phone.

The new OS also features voice activated searches which can be used to search for content on the phone or search online. Online features have also had a bump up from the improved web browser on the Bold 9900. This includes support for Just in Time (JIT) Java as well as HTML5 video content.

The Bold 9900 comes with decent 3G (HSPA) and Wi-Fi connections in place and also comes with some other excellent online features like BlackBerry Maps. The phone also comes with excellent email support and instant messaging including BlackBerry Messenger. The Bold 9900 also comes with support for BB features like Enterprise Server and also supports social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Camera

The Bold 9900 features a 5 megapixel rear facing camera that comes with some great features including. The camera comes with an LED flash so that you can take photos in darker environments and also comes with geo-tagging and face detection.

This camera also supports 720p video recording, and the Bold supports playback for 720p videos so you can watch your HD creations straight after recording them. As well as this the Bold 9900 comes with an excellent media player allowing you to enjoy a wide range of music and video formats. There is 8GB internal storage space and an additional 32GB on offer through microSD.

Professional Features

The Bold 9900 comes with the same great range of professional features that you would expect to find on any BlackBerry phone with some excellent new additions thanks to the new operating system.

As well as coming with support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server the Bold 9900 now features BlackBerry Balance. This allows you to separate work and personal content on the phone, so that your personal emails and social networks can be kept apart from information.

The Bold 9900 also comes with Docs to Go document editors allowing you to edit MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and there is also a pdf viewer. Of course these are some of the features where having a QWERTY keypad is of great benefit, and this is certainly the case with the Bold 9900.

Summary

This is the first BlackBerry Bold phone with a touch sensitive screen and it will be a welcomed addition by many fans of the phone series. The Bold 9900 still retains the QWERTY keyboard and optical trackpad of the original Bold phones and at the same time provides greater ease of use with its touch sensitive interface.

The phone is a lot speedier than earlier Bold handsets thanks to a faster 1.2GHz processor, but much of this speed increase is down to the new BlackBerry OS 7. There really is a noticeable difference when using the phone and the new Liquid Graphics system makes for much smoother visuals when performing actions such as the zoom.

Although there are some people arguing that the Bold 9900 could have done with a larger screen to make best use of the new touch sensitivity this would ultimately be betraying the idea that BlackBerry phones represent. The touch sensitivity shouldn´t trick you into thinking that this is a phone with a similar nature to the likes of the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S2 as it is essentially a BlackBerry phone through and through. This is its greatest strength and the touch sensitivity just adds a nice new feature to an already great phone design. What´s more, the Bold 9900 is the thinnest BlackBerry Bold yet released at just 10.5mm.