Blackberry : Bold And Beautiful

Slimmer and sleeker

What can one say about the new Blackberry Bold? RIM has used the word that best describes the phone as the phone’s name! Blackberry has finally gone sleek with the Bold; it has to, especially with Nokia’s E-series models getting slimmer and sleeker. As you hold the Bold, you can’t fail to notice the nice leather-like back panel. It gives it a classy-look, at the same time, giving you a good grip.

Learning curve

If you haven’t used a Blackberry before, you may find that handling it requires a small learning curve. First, you realise the small white button below the screen is not a joystick, but a trackball - nice and sensitive. And at times, a little too sensitive. You often tend to move the trackball fast and lose the cursor. You even tend to move the cursor when you try to press the trackball to select an application. A slightly bigger trackball could make the navigation and control easier.

Keyboard

The QWERTY keyboard looks good, is well spaced-out and is also easy to type. Those who are not used to QWERTY keyboards may have to fiddle around quite a bit while switching between letters and numbers. The keyboard backlighting feature is sure to add to the experience. The Bold’s dimensions are nice and comfortable - wide enough to fit a QWERTY keypad, but narrow enough to hold it comfortably in one hand.The keypad is a pleasure to use at most times, but it is irritating to have to use the key for entering frequently used punctuation marks like a period or a comma.

Screen

But what attracts you is the screen. Rich and vibrant, the screen is the most wonderful feature of the phone, bright and crisp and showing vivid colours with just the correct contrast. One look at it and you know you are looking at a premium product. It’s quite clear and sharp even when the brightness is set to low.

The screen transitions are fairly smooth and there is no dissonance between the performance of the screen and the price of the phone. The UI is fairly intuitive to Blackberry and business phone users, but if you are moving into this from a consumer/multimedia model, it will need some getting used to.

Icons

What’s likely to confuse you are the icons. For example, the icons for GPS and alarm clock look quite similar. And there is an e-mail icon in the home screen, and also another similar icon in the menus that says ‘SMS and e-mail’. Many icons are not intuitive. You have to hover over them to find out what they actually do. Often it will be better to have the manual handy.

Office

The office applications - Word, Spreadsheet and Presentation - are compiled in the ‘Documents to Go’ suite. But the default ‘to Go’ applications do not allow you to create documents. You have to go for a paid version to do so (that costs around $70 from Dataviz, the creator of the program). With the default version you can only view documents, rendering the version quite useless. And to make things worse, you get a warning that the ‘to Go’ applications are not compatible with Microsoft Word and Excel files.

Browser

There are two views for viewing Web sites - Page view and Column view. The default Page view opens up the entire page with a zoom option. You have to click wherever you want to go on the page (like in Opera Mini). The column view is tedious and requires a lot of scrolling, which can be painful.The browser also does not support Flash, which again, is a surprise for a business phone. When you pay more than Rs 30,000 for a phone, you expect a full-fledged office phone, not a phone with key features missing.

Camera

The Bold comes with a 2 megapixel camera - a recurrence of the same mistake done by Apple in the iPhone. Of course, business users are not going to go around clicking, but they will expect whatever they capture - for example, during a picnic or tour - to be large enough to be viewed, at least larger than a thumbnail. Though the images are good, phone-makers could try to include a 3 or 5 mega pixel camera in high end mobiles.The camera produced average results for capturing still pictures as well as for some basic video but the phone screen/display clarity saves the day for the Blackberry Bold. Moreover, the phone offers surprisingly good sound for music and multimedia - no more of that weak, shallow sound only because you are having a ‘business’ phone. The choice of ringtones and alert sounds are very good as well, providing you with a range of discreet and loud tones.

GPS, maps

The maps application does not have any map pre-installed. You will have to purchase them separately. The same applies to the GPS.

Battery

The battery is quite decent and lasts over two days. But make it one day if you use a lot of GPRS browsing.The start-up is excruciatingly slow. The first time we powered on, we thought the device had crashed. But once it starts, working on the Bold is a breeze.

Multimedia

Watching videos is great, with the brilliant screen accentuating the experience but what spoils the fun is the inefficient media manager.

Conclusion

Applications are pretty standard for a business phone - e-mail, calendar etc. But the phone that was reviewed had a version of the office package that would only allow you to edit office docs, not create them. Quad band GSM is rounded off with three band HSDPA support for very fast mobile Internet, as well as with Wi-Fi, so it is good to go anywhere in the world.

Voice quality was good, with battery life being slightly above average for a business phone, including when combined with a Bluetooth headset and some Wi-Fi usage. Overall, it is a great business mobile phone, good to have if e-mail is as important as voice when you travel.

Price: Rs 34,990