Black As Usual, But Bolder Than Before

Blackberry is what many would consider the king of smart phones. The large masses might not be impressed by their kind of phones, but these aren’t made for those who want to use fancy headphones and play games and movies on them — this doesn’t mean you can’t. The new Blackberry Bold comes across as one of these kind of phones — the one that is made strictly for the busy manager or businessman but which will let him have some fun at the same time.

The first impression you get is that it’s rich and special. The leather-like material back, the shape and of course the glowing tracer ball at the center give you that feeling. The phone is light but a little wide. It’s thin at the same time so you shouldn’t have any problem fitting it in your pockets. It fits into your palm comfortably as well when you want to use it.

The design of the phone is attractive even though this is supposed to be firstly a practical phone — not something to show off. The only slight problem is with opening the back to access the battery slot. Fortunately that’s something you don’t have to do very often. The back lit keypad like many other Blackberry devices has a QWERTY design. The keys are bevelled and banked to the sides to make typing easy. It’s surprisingly very usable. The key-presses feel right and with some practice, you can get pretty fast with it. The panel between the screen and the QWERTY keypad has the dedicated buttons for picking up, dropping calls and running applications.

The trackball at the center is used to scroll around its beautiful interface. It trackball works well but has a very fine coarseness to it — something like rolling a ball bearing on sandpaper. The body and screen are glossy and that means this phone like many others we’ve seen recently shows up fingerprints.

The screen is compact because of the phone’s size but this is a really good looking screen. It’s really dense for its size so images look absolutely amazing. The interface is simple to use and it looks exceptionally good with this kind of screen. There are loads of menus and it’s a joy to spend time with each application. Applications run very well but the booting time for the phone is considerably slower. Attention is given to every application is great and using them requires no previous experience with Blackberry phones. Applications include some trial versions of Office-replacements. There are time planners and even a few games thrown in for those long waits at the airport. Scrolling through images on the powerful screen is fun and so is watching videos.

A 3.5 mm jack will let you connect your earphones without having to use any pesky converters and adapters. Reception is good but the speaker quality isn’t as impressive. The sides are lined with buttons for volume controls and the slot for attaching external memory cards.

All the usual expected technologies on the checklist can be found on this phone — WiFi, Bluetooth and a 2 MP camera with a flash. Quality is average and using it is not a lot of fun. It shouldn’t really matter a lot as this phone isn’t design for taking high quality photographs anyway. Speaker quality is decent but it crackles a little bit at high volumes.