AT&T's newest BlackBerry finally arrives, and we have our RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 review to dissect and discover the highs and lows of the highly-anticipated smartphone.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 (AT&T):
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_it00.jpg) The RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 on AT&T is a phone that leaves us vexed. Of course it's a very good phone, it's a BlackBerry. It made calls that sounded great and it has one of the best displays on the market, which compliments the updated user interface and the fantastic video performance. We liked the music player as well, and even the apps that frustrated us still functioned nicely, we just feel like they could look much better. The BlackBerry OS, despite the obvious surface improvements in the BlackBerry Bold, is in need of some deep scrubbing, and even on this impressive multimedia device, it still looks a lot like the interface of a two-way pager. The messaging app makes even e-mail look more like text messaging (and vice versa), and the Web browser still can't manage to load up our own homepage. True BlackBerry fans will ignore these issues and simply appreciate the update, which makes for an impressive music-playing, video watching device. But to compete with the newest smartphones on the market, RIM will have to dig deeper and create something truly new for the BlackBerry OS. Release: November 2008. Price: $300.
Pros: Fantastic screen, complimented by a dark, colorful new interface theme. Great music and video playback. Loads of connectivity options. Nice keyboard.
Cons: Visual polish on menus doesn't go nearly deep enough. This OS needs a makeover. Messaging options surprisingly lacking and dated. Sub-par camera and Web browser.
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74%
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Full review of the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 (AT&T):
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Hardware design - Very good
The standout feature of the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 is the gorgeous screen. Even though it's smaller than the screen on the Apple iPhone 3G, it packs the same number of pixels, and the increased pixels per inch (ppi) makes this one of the most dazzling displays we've seen. The updated BlackBerry interface does it some justice, but the phone really shines when you load your own movies into the phone's 1GB of onboard storage.
We tested the phone's display using the same video clip on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 and the Apple iPhone. While the iPhone did have a larger picture, obviously, the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 looked better in a few ways. First, thanks to the increased pixel density, the picture looked sharper and more clear, while the Apple iPhone showed more jagged lines and compression artifacts. But the color was also better on the BlackBerry Bold, and the better contrast produced richer colors and deeper blacks. Overall, we wish the BlackBerry Bold screen was much larger, but we can't complain at all about the quality.
Even though the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 is about the same size as the RIM BlackBerry 8820, when we showed the phone to BlackBerry addicts we know, they mistook it for an update of the BlackBerry Curve. In fact, with its curved edges and rounded back, it does seem a bit less serious than the older 8800-series. Until you turn it on, of course. Still, we liked the textured, faux-leather backing and the wide, glossy keys under the screen. The keyboard was a bit flat for our taste, but it retains the contiguous, sloping style of the BlackBerry 8820. The trackball on this phone seemed especially sensitive and intuitive in our hands-on tests.
The phone has a nice selection of dedicated keys, including a key on either side that can be custom programmed. By default, one starts the camera while the other opens voice recognition. Both are fine choices, though we wish the camera button had a little camera picture on it to remind us. The phone also has an easily accessible microSDHC card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a miniUSB port for charging and desktop synchronization. It's as if RIM is one of the few companies reading their own reviews, because they leave none of the minor complaints we've had with other smartphones unaddressed.
Interface design - Very good
It was a mixed blessing that RIM first released the BlackBerry OS 4.6 on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220. It looks great on that phone, but we think the dark, glowing interface with its crystal clear icons and sharp lines was made for the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000. Since we've already seen the new theme on another phone, we've had time to digest the idea that only the top-most layer of the OS has gotten a visual boost. That top layer sparkles, though, especially on this dense, 480 by 320 pixel screen.
Once you dig deeper, you get an interface that is clearly descended from the days when pagers roamed the earth. RIM just can't simplify the long, long lists that pop open whenever you press the menu key, and can't seem to find a way to polish some of the most functional, and therefore most frequently-used, apps on the phone. The calendar, the messaging apps, all the settings menus; these are highly functional, more than on many competitors, but they're also bare to the point of being unfriendly. Slowly but surely, that new RIM design aesthetic will hopefully seep down into the lower layers. Until then, enjoy the Applications menu, because it looks fantastic.
Calling - Very good
Calls on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 sounded great, better than most phones we hear. We seem to remember better sound from the older BlackBerry 8820, also on AT&T, but callers reported a clear, if warm sounding, conversation. For reception, the BlackBerry Bold held on as tight as it could. It certainly matched our Apple iPhone 3G, which was always a key concern, and our iPhone has been managing great signal strength. We're still performing our battery tests, but if AT&T's estimate of 5 hours isn't a very low-ball estimate, we'll be disappointed. Remember that the BlackBerry 8820 made a 9-hour call, but that was before AT&T's 3G HSDPA network invaded the phone.
For calling features, the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 synchronized perfectly with our Outlook address book. We liked the possibility of synchronizing with our online Yahoo address book as well, but we didn't choose that option in our tests. The contact list is among the more barren apps on the phone, but like all the less attractive apps on this device, it had a great personality, and was able to manage live, while-we-typed searching from the standby screen, which is a feature we like.
Speaker-independent voice recognition worked like a charm, and we like that it comes assigned to the side-key by default. Conference calling required some menu drilling, like everything on a BlackBerry, but it wasn't too difficult. The phone had a great speakerphone. We tried it for calls and for music and found it to be surprisingly loud and clear.
Messaging - Good
Seriously, we know that we're being a bit harsh knocking points off this BlackBerry phone in the messaging department, but we think that RIM could do much better. The phone gets all the standard BlackBerry messaging options, including support for up to 10 e-mail accounts and a well-organized, unified messaging center that groups e-mail and threaded SMS conversations. It's all very functional, but we're seeing much nicer looking e-mail on Apple's phone, the T-Mobile G1 running Google's Android and even Windows Mobile devices, like the HTC Touch Diamond. The e-mail and messaging apps on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 are highly functional, with plenty of great features and intuitive design built into those long lists of options, but it feels like it hasn't improved much, if any, in quite some time. We'd also like to see more IM on this phone, as we know that there are Instant Messaging clients for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Gtalk for the BlackBerry platform. We wonder why they didn't come loaded on this device. Instead, you get only BlackBerry Messenger to talk to other RIM BlackBerry devices.
The keyboard on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 felt very nice in our typing tests. We typed our e-mails and even edited some Word documents, and we found the keyboard to be soft and comfortable, with plenty of travel in the keys. The contiguous, sloping keyboard had a tendency to slide our fingers towards the wrong key choice occasionally, but with just a little practice our aim improved and we were typing like a champ, sometimes even without looking.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
The calendar app, perhaps more than any other on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000, could benefit from a visual update, which would make it more usable at a glance. As is, the calendar is robust and powerful, with plenty of fields to keep track of appointments and meetings. Still, it looks about the same as it did when BlackBerry devices first hit the market. It's a wireframe box, a list of times in a vertical column. It's pretty ugly.
For Office document handling, the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 comes packed with DataViz Documents to Go. This isn't a complete, premium edition, so you won't be able to create new documents unless you pay to upgrade. But for our purposes, the suite did fine opening attachments and letting us make minor edits to Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Web browser - Mediocre
Sure, we were forgiving of some of the productivity apps that needed a visual overhaul. With the Web browser, however, we're less apt to forgive. The Web browser is a sure sign of how advanced a smartphone OS has become, and here again, the BlackBerry OS lags behind. We wonder why RIM and AT&T didn't just include an Opera browser on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000, because the HotSpot and MediaNet browsers just can't cut it. The browser managed to chew up our own homepage, and what it spit out was lopsided and poorly rendered. We expected a desktop-grade browser, something that could compete with Apple's Safari browser or even Nokia's Web browser, but instead the BlackBerry Bold let us down, with a browser no better than Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile.
The phone also seemed somewhat sluggish when network reception was poor. We tried many times to connect to our open Wi-Fi network at home, but the phone seemed to prefer its own 3G signal. Either way, the Web browser was fairly sluggish in our tests, and was regularly bested in side-by-side page loads by the Apple iPhone 3G. We liked the way the trackball controlled a zoom magnifying glass for page browsing, but this sort of navigation proved slow, and we wish that RIM could come up with a new method for mapping the trackball to the Browser window.
Music - Very good
Here's one area where the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 really excelled. The music player was nice looking and powerful, with some good playback options to shuttle through tracks using the trackball. The phone had no trouble recognizing and organizing our music tracks, and almost all of our album artwork came through. The phone has a design that makes music listening easier, with a 3.5mm headphone jack and an external microSD card slot. We loaded up 8GB of music with no trouble from the BlackBerry Bold. We could have skipped the Roxio Manager for music, though. It seems like an unnecessary program for transferring songs, since Windows Media Player is, surprisingly, more intuitive and user-friendly. Music transferred very quickly to the BlackBerry Bold, whether we were synchronizing to the 1GB of internal memory via the Roxio Manager, or copying directly to the memory card in Mass Storage mode on the Mac side of things.
Video - Very good
We did use the media manager to convert some video files for playback on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000, and we were amazed to see how good videos look on the high-density screen. Playback options were fairly basic, but we were able to skip to all the good parts of our movies. The BlackBerry Bold came with a preview clip for the Speed Racer movie, and the video was so vibrant and colorful that it almost made that horrible film forgivable (almost). Even AT&T's Cellular Video service looked better on this phone. Usually we knock a phone for blocky, sluggish clips from the streaming service, but on this phone, clips of Colbert were actually very nice looking, though still not up to the standard set by AT&T's Mobile TV. It's surprising to think that video playback is the best new feature on a BlackBerry phone, of all things, but on this device, it is a feature you must see to believe.
GPS navigation - Good
We used AT&T Navigator for turn-by-turn navigation on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000. The app worked fine, but did have some trouble getting an initial lock on the satellites. We had to drive around a bit in lower Manhattan before we found a nice patch of open sky for the phone to find its way. Once we were found, the app filled the wide screen well, and maps loaded fairly quickly. We also liked the traffic warnings, which helped us avoid potential disaster on our commute home to New Jersey.
Camera - Mediocre
Perhaps BlackBerry devices should return to the days when they didn't need cameras. The RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 might be better off without its paltry lens. The problem with having such a beautiful, clear screen on a cell phone is that it reveals even the flaws in its own camera, where the phone screen is usually the lonely refuge of lousy cameraphone pics. Pictures look blurry and lacked detail even on the phone's display, and videos were blocky and liquid, even though the camcorder resolution perfectly matches the Bold's 480 by 320 pixel screen.
Yellow Vespa
Everything is blurry here, and the upper left corner of the screen looks like a nuclear accident. The yellow on the Vespa looked accurate, but was too hazy to care.
Building facade
Here, you can trace the strange focal point on the lens, where it seems to sharpen about 2/3 of the way up, then fade into a darker blue cast. Way too blurry at the bottom of the building, closer to us, to impress us.
Street scene
A very noisy shot with most fine details completely lost in the light shade of the early afternoon. People look like specters crossing the street.
Self portrait
We might be that ugly, but we're not that blurry. Still, with our reflection on the metal accent under the lens, it was easy to line up a centered self-portrait shot.
Street perspective
The camera didn't know what to focus on as we tried to capture cars converging past the center island.
Neon sign
Surprisingly, some of the highlighted flourish on the wall behind the sign seems sharp, but none of the text inside the neon border is clear.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 will be available on AT&T on November 4 for $300.
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