Monthly Archives: November 2010

Available from Clove for £393.63

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is one of my favourite smartphones for a number of reasons (review here) and the BlackBerry Torch managed to remove many of those reasons and give OS 6 a platform that was not as good as the theory suggested it would be.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 has, don’t hold your breath, seriously impressive battery life, a great screen that is viewable in all conditions, the best keyboard of any smartphone on the market, phenomenal speed, lots of power and a form factor that is unrivalled in its durability and practicality. The BlackBerry Torch has some of the above traits such as a decent screen and serious speed, but the battery isn’t quite at Bold levels and the keyboard took a serious turn for the worse once it was morphed into a slider.

The BlackBerry Bold 9780 could be seen as a mixture of the 9700 and Torch; it retains the glorious form factor of the 9700 and OS 6 from the Torch, but loses almost every other Torch trait in favour of squeezing OS 6 into a more up to date 9700- a good move.

RIM often gets criticised for making phones that are too similar to the previous model, and that argument could certainly be aired with the Bold 9780, but some things do not need to change. The design, as I said earlier, is ultra practical and stylish in the most understated of ways. I have reviewed and tested many, many smartphones, but to date the Bold 9700 / 9780 design is still the smartphone I look at and consider to be the pinnacle of design for a busy person in 2010.

In the box

* BlackBerry Bold 9780
* Battery
* 2GB MicroSD Card
* Mains Adaptor
* USB Cable
* Headset
* Pocket Case
* Documentation

It’s all pretty standard, but the return of a case is most welcome. It is a good quality one as well and the quality and smell, of leather, will likely mean that you do not need to go out and purchase a separate form of protection. The inclusion of a 2GB MicroSD card feels a little stingy for a £400 phone and of course the headset could be better.

The battery is a whopping 1500mAh which immediately leads me to expect good things in the power area and the only other comment that is needed concerning the extras is the inclusion of CD software- do we really need to see CDs bundled with phones when everyone has internet access?

Overall though, I am more than happy with the contents and they offer more than enough to get any user up and running without needing to buy extras.

First Impressions

It’s a BlackBerry Bold. I knew it would look and feel good and everything is exactly as I expected. From the fancy leather back cover to the glorious keyboard all of the good stuff remains and there are few disappointments so far. There is something special about a well made BlackBerry ‘without’ a touch screen and from a hardware point of view I simply cannot complain at all.

You may be thinking that this is just a slightly upgraded Bold 9700, but there are numerous improvements-

The camera is 5 Megapixels compared to 3.2 Megapixels in the 9700 and now includes continuous autofocus.

Internal RAM has been pushed up to 512MB which is much more than the OS could ever need- nice to see an overuse of RAM rather than the bare minimum.

A2DP is included and that is it from a hardware point of view apart from a slight increase in size and weight which is not really noticeable in day to day use-

Bold 9700: 122 grams, 109x60x14.1mm

Bold 9780: 136 grams, 114x66x15mm

Of course the main addition is BlackBerry OS6 which didn’t turn out so well in my BlackBerry Torch review. Here’s a quote- “If I ignore the hardware of the Torch and just look at OS 6 it is without doubt better than OS 5. However, it is still OS5 in a new set of clothes. OS 5 is still, in my opinion, the best smartphone OS for getting things done and for communicating with others; it is quicker than any other platform, it is very stable and crucially it presents your calendar, contacts and everything else in a format that is almost entirely text based. There are few fancy graphics and the menus to get in the way, and it just works. With OS 6 you still get an implementation that is visually simple to work with, but with some added aesthetics that do little more than make it look more modern. Every part of an interface needs to be implemented for a reason and I am not convinced that OS 6 doesn’t just have a lot of fancy graphics added just to look like the rest.

The calendar is a good example where the interface has been overhauled and retained the crispness of the OS 5 calendar view. It does look better, but this then leads me ask two questions. Is OS 6 little more than a graphical refresh of OS 5, thus adding little extra value, or is it an enhancement that takes away the simplicity of the original? I believe it to be the first and am left feeling somewhat underwhelmed by this OS upgrade.”

As you can see I wasn’t particularly impressed with OS 6 on the Torch, but is it any better on the 9780? Has the new OS ruined a near perfect piece of phone hardware or has the 9780 proved that OS 6 is a very capable mobile OS? Come back tomorrow to find out.