RIM BlackBerry Bold 9900 review

RIM’s BlackBerry Bold 9900 is the thinnest BlackBerry to date, and its stainless steel construction and excellent keyboard make it stand out in a world of plastic phones. Despite its size, it packs a 1.2GHz processor and 8GB of storage, and its 2.8in screen has a generous 640×480 resolution, making it crystal clear.

The 9900’s build quality is truly impressive. Instead of the luxury leather back of some of its brethren, there’s a carbon fibre cover for the battery compartment. The stainless steel frame feels incredibly sturdy and helps protect the headphone and microUSB ports as well as housing the music controls, camera shutter button and screen lock button.

A 5-megapixel camera and LED flash on the rear take decent snaps, but as with most smartphone cameras there’s lots of noise in dark areas. Videos were also full of colour but with a resolution of 640×480 at 23 frames per second, they aren’t particularly good quality.

As usual, the BlackBerry keyboard is a joy to use with its sculpted keys and logical layout. Above it, an optical trackpad button sits between the standard Menu, Back and call buttons. As there’s also a capacitive touchscreen, you have plenty of options for controlling the operating system. The screen’s 640×480 resolution gives it a pixel density of 287 dpi, so pictures are incredibly sharp. We found the touch interface responsive and smooth.

BlackBerry’s App World keeps growing and although it doesn’t have the breadth of choice you get with Apple’s App Store or Android’s market, it’s full of useful apps rather than the games and screensavers that fill other less established app stores. There’s already a good selection of apps installed on the 9900, with an office file editor and PDF viewer, a robust selection of social networking and IM apps, and multimedia tools including Amazon’s Music Store.

BlackBerry OS 7 is slick, and addresses many of the problems for which we hated RIM’s previous operating systems. Gone are the text-only menus with long lists of arcane settings: options are now logically grouped, with the less-used options kept out of the way. Settings used on a daily basis, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and alarms are accessible via the drop-down status bar at the top of the home screen. We particularly liked the universal search: you simply start typing from the home screen to search anything from contacts to apps.

RIM may be struggling to keep up with more consumer-friendly Android and Apple smartphones, but its secure email system and the popularity of BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) still make a BlackBerry an attractive option. However, despite the 9900’s fast processor, great screen and useful apps, it’s incredibly expensive, limiting its market to corporate users and those with plenty of spare cash. Unless you absolutely need secure email, Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro has a great QWERTY keyboard and gives you access to the brimming Android Market, so it’s much better value.