Make no mistake about it: The Bold 9900 is the best BlackBerry smartphone to date. But even with a handsome redesign highlighted by a new capacitive touchscreen (plus all the familiar features that make a BlackBerry a Blackberry) will it be enough to close the gap between Apple or Android? Maybe a little?
Take my hand. Let’s find out.
(MORE: T-Mobile’s 4G BlackBerry Bold Costs a Cool $300)
The Outside
On the surface it’s beautifully designed with a surprising amount of professional-grade heft. Unlike the flimsy Curve (or even previous versions of the Bold before it) it doesn’t feel like a toy, thanks in no small part to the rubbery, carbon-fiber backing joined by a metal rim that eases roundedly into the bezel.
Smooth, curved edges make it especially comfortable to grip, while the hallmark physical keyboard that BlackBerry fanatics swear by is as good as ever. Actually, scratch that: It’s one of the best physical keyboards I’ve ever used on a smartphone (including sliders like the Droid line). The buttons are large and well-separated, with a discernible amount of pressure on push-back. That affirmative *click* you get with each button press? Very satisfying.
Here’s a size comparison with the iPhone 4:
As you can see, the 9900 is a bit shorter, but also a few millimeters wider and just a hair thicker. It feels significantly lighter, too, at just 4.5 ounces.
The LCD touchscreen is brightly-lit and responsive with BlackBerry’s highest resolution yet at 480 x 640 pixels. You can fly through menus, pictures or whatever else you’re flicking through with all the familiar pinch-to-zoom and sideways scrolling functionality native to most current touchscreen phones.
(MORE: New BlackBerry Curves Are Probably Not for You)
But that isn’t to say that the touchscreen here is completely intuitive: The Bold still has a trackpad for your thumb, which does little but eat into the touchscreen’s real estate. And with a display of only 2.8-inches, it feels like space wasted.
I’m sure the design team had their reasons for doing this (training wheels, perhaps?), but the inclusion of the trackpad not only feels redundant, it’s downright confusing. I found myself often hesitating between using the touchscreen or the trackpad to navigate, sometimes switching between the two awkwardly.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against learning new behaviors, but here it would make a lot more sense if it was just a touchscreen. When you’re using a phone you want it to feel like second nature: The best smartphones blend into your hand and become an extension of you.
Here, with both a touchscreen and a trackpad, that isn’t the case at all.
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Streaming video is as smooth as I’ve seen on a BlackBerry (T-Mobile’s 4G connectivity helps here), and audio from the speakers comes through crisp, clear and plenty loud. But again, the small screen makes it hard to watch a clip any longer than the Double Rainbow Guy.
The 5-megapixel camera also leaves a lot to be desired, and as with most BlackBerry phones feels as though it were tossed on as an afterthought. It has an LED flash you can toggle on and off with the ability to record video at 720p. But compared to other modern smartphones, the engineering here feels downright lazy, capturing stale-looking images with flat uninspired colors. Here’s one I took using the Bold’s native camera app:
And here’s one straight from an iPhone 4:
There’s no contest. (Oh, and there’s no front-facing camera either.)
(MORE: The Top 10 Camera Apps For the iPhone)
The Inside
On paper the Bold holds its own: It comes with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor and 8GB of internal memory. BlackBerry’s OS 7 is smooth and loads apps quickly, and when augmented with the new touchscreen makes for a seriously fast UI.
On the upside, BlackBerry’s strengths like email and BBM are as brutally efficient as ever: No unnecessary frills or window dressings; just straightforward and super-fast messaging that keep you up to the minute with push notifications.
It may not be the prettiest set-up in smartphone land, but it’s a well-designed OS that does exactly what you tell it to do.
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The full HTML-enabled web browser is more than serviceable — it’s actually quite nice — but, again, the tiny screen renders it a squinty-eyed browsing experience: You’re just not going to spend much time lurking the net here. Still, the 4G connection is forgivingly fast: The mobile site for TIME.com took less than eight seconds to load, while Google.com clocked in at less than three seconds (even when I tried it from an area of our office with crappy reception).
Now for the downside, and it’s a doozy: BlackBerry’s App World is still as lackluster as ever. Though RIM recently opened up BBM to third-party designers in hopes attracting submissions to its app database, the options are still paltry when compared to the Android Market or the App Store. To put things gently: App World still sucks.
(MORE: The Tragic Decline of BlackBerry)
Preloaded apps like Twitter, Facebook and other productivity apps like Calendar work fine (though they’re not anything to write home about), and anyone looking to do any sort of gaming beyond Brickbreaker or Solitaire should definitely look elsewhere.
The Verdict
RIM proves that they can still launch a solid, professional-feeling product in spite of a pretty glaring design misstep — that damn, space-eating trackpad. For BlackBerry purists it has all the stuff you’d want in a BlackBerry made better than ever, with one of the best physical keyboards around. Period.
For professionals? The Bold’s a workhorse with a durable, long-lasting battery (it still has a charge after 48-hours of casual use) and the best built-in email and messaging system of any smartphone out there. As a communication-only device for all things work-related it’s tough to beat.
But alas, for the average consumer, it’s still pales in comparison to Androids or iPhones with bigger screens and a far, far wider selection of apps, which, if RIM doesn’t find a way to get third-party developers onboard, will be the ugly death of it.
The short of it is that there just isn’t very much to do on the Bold, or any BlackBerry quite frankly. They’re good machines at what they do—work stuff—just not much else.
So, yes, it’s the best BlackBerry ever, hands down. For loyalists and business professionals that’s great news; for everyone else, though, it’s nothing terribly new, and unfortunately there’s nothing outstanding here you can’t get elsewhere, especially at its sky-high asking price: $300 with a two-year contract on T-Mobile. Ugh.
Second Opinions
Telegraph | BGR | CNET | Ubergizmo
Chris Gayomali is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @chrigz, on Facebook, or on Google+. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.