RIM Blackberry Bold 9790 review

With the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9900, RIM tried to combine the best of both worlds: a top-notch keyboard and a touchscreen interface. With the Bold 9790 RIM has taken the same idea, but in a smaller, slimmer body that’s arguably easier to carry around with you.

In addition to the keyboard and touchscreen, there’s an optical trackpad button. It’s a little sensitive at first, but once you get used to it, it’s a great way to scroll through a large list of emails and select menu options.

One of the big changes from the Bold 9900 is that the 9790 has a slightly slower single-core processor: 1GHz versus 1.2GHz. It’s fine for most uses of the OS, but we found that pressing and holding the menu button to bring up BlackBerry 7’s task switching could bring the phone to halt. This was particularly true if a busy application is running in the background, such as the app update process, brings up the clock icon halting you from doing anything else.

Build quality is great, as we’d expect from a BlackBerry. The matt, rubberised back feels tough and secure, but it’s easy to slip off if you need to get to the battery compartment and SIM card slot. The rear also houses the lens for the 5-megapixel camera.

This takes crisp shots with little noise. It’s nice to see an LED flash, which can help illuminate dark areas, letting you use the Bold 9790 to take shots in pretty much any conditions. A dedicated camera button sits on the side of the phone underneath the volume rocker switch. It’s useful if you turn the phone on its side, although the screen orientation means that you’re taking pictures in portrait mode. For landscape shooting we found it easier to hold the phone normally and use the trackpad button, particular as swiping up or down on this zooms in and out.

Video can also be shots at 640×480. Again it looked crisp and the results were smooth, but the quality and resolution lags behind the best smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone 4S.

Fitting a keyboard means that there’s less room for a screen than on a traditional smartphone. However, with a resolution of 480×360 the pixel density is pretty high, and text and images look sharp and clear. There’s no getting round the fact that web browsing demands a lot of scrolling around, so this is a handset that’s better suited to text-based applications.

That’s where this phone really starts to shine. Thanks to the famous BlackBerry keyboard it’s incredibly easy and fast to type long messages. The keyboard’s moulded keys are small but shaped in such a way that you rarely manage to miss-hit or press two keys at once.

BlackBerry OS has improved drastically over the last couple of years, and now includes more social aggregation as standard. You can now add Facebook and Twitter feeds to your inbox, along with text messages and emails, and in addition to BBM you get Google Talk and Windows Messenger clients built-in.

Of course, email is the thing that you’re most likely to want to use this handset for. It arguably works best in corporate environments where the RIM server is installed, but the phone will connect to an Exchange account with Outlook Web Access enabled, as well as standard email accounts, such as Gmail. However, it’s a little fiddly to setup and BlackBerry OS lacks the simple menus of Android and iOS.

Hardware wise, the Bold 9790 is bang up-to-date, with NFC and 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi built in. There’s little support for NFC at the moment, but 5GHz wireless may be useful if you’ve got a posh router and want the best wireless speeds.

Where the Bold 9790 falls down, though, is with App support. BlackBerry App World has got better, but it lacks official apps from a lot of big companies, there are fewer apps than available for Android and iPhone and less quality control.

Given the small screen and lack of apps, the Bold 9790 is only of interest for corporate environments or if you want its excellent email handling and keyboard. We’d rather spend the money on a phone with a larger touchscreen, such as the excellent Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S.