Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Review

As the Bold nine thousand nine hundred is the latest smartphone from RIM, it is obviously also the greatest in a long line of QWERTY smartphones. Blackberry users will want to know how it performs as a Blackberry device, and others will want to know how it compares with other smartphones available on the market. We’ll go over all that, but let’s look at how RIM presents the Bold 9900: The “thinnest Blackberry yet”, with “liquid graphics” (whatever that means), “superior performance”, “captures life in HD”, “breakthrough technologies”. Those are… bold claims, but does the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Series live up to the marketing pitch? Let’s take a look. Context

Before getting into the review, let me tell you how I use the phone so that you can see where I’m coming from, and why I see things the way I do. We all have different usage patterns, so dogmatic reviews are not that useful to many readers. Instead, I’ll attempt to give you a good sense of how (and why) things worked for me, and you should be able to figure out if that will work for yourself. If you have more questions by the end of this article, please drop a comment or some feedback. I’ll do my best to address them.

Technical Highlights

Two.8” 640×480 multi-touch display (16M colors)

Blackberry seven OS

8GB of internal storage + MicroSD slot (32GB max)

Five Megapixel rear camera, 720p movie recording

GSM+UMTS (9900 model) or CDMA+UMTS (9930 model)

115 x sixty six x Ten.5mm

Outward design

The fresh Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Series keeps the overall look that has made the previous ones successful. I find the design to be neat, mostly practical and very readable. At very first glance, it is effortless to distinguish the few areas of the phone: display, physical UI buttons and keyboard. The phone is a little broader than its predecessor, but this size makes it nice to hold in the palm (I use my left palm). My thumb grounds naturally on the trackpad, which is frequently used to choose which app I’m going to run.

Blackberry is using a metallic aluminum framework all around the phone. This is a mechanism also used by Samsung, LG and Motorola in their resent designs. It works well, and the phone feels very solid and rigid.

On the left side you will find the micro-USB and the audio jack ports. Both are at a relatively elevated position and should not interfere too much with your forearm when the phone is connected via USB. Putting the USB port lower was a mistake that has been done in innumerable phone designs.

On the right side, the volume and camera buttons are occupying the upper and lower catches sight of. In my opinion, the camera button is a bit superfluous as you can indeed use it only in portrait mode, which is not the primary option for most users. Also, I happened to press it unintentionally a number of times, but in the end, the user has the option to make it “do nothing” in the settings, so it’s not a big deal.

While there is no front-facing camera (bye bye movie talk), the backside hosts a discrete five Megapixel camera with a single LED flash. The battery cover is totally plane (with a carbon fiber texture), which is excellent if you want to use the phone when it is resting on a table. From a design standpoint, a curved back may have been better, but with a plane back, the user can thrust keys or tap the screen without inducing a tilt when the phone rests on a table. At the same time, the slight curve visually hides its true thickness of 0.41” (Ten.5mm), making look even thinner.

Keyboard (excellent): The keyboard is simply excellent. It is just a little bit broader than the previous Bold 9700, but in my opinion the keys feel even better. In brief, Blackberry has made the best QWERTY keyboard… even better.

For me, the difference in typing speed is thick, when compared to a touch display. However, Keep in mind that not all QWERTY keyboards are equal. Blackberry’s own “Torch” smartphone keyboard is not as good as the Bold, and other slider phones are even further away. RIM has built an empire on this keyboard, and this is partly why Blackberry phones are still so popular.

The display quality is very good. It’s crisp and the colors are accurate

Display (very good): The Bold nine thousand nine hundred display is very crisp: it has a pixel density of 287pixels per inch (ppi), which is not as crisp as the iPhone 4’s three hundred twenty six ppi, but this is still very readable and acute. Unlike touch smartphones, the screen is used in landscape mode by default (instead of portrait), and the main downside of this is the diminished vertical screen real estate. Lists, documents and web pages are much shorter (see photo below).

The Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred has a touch display, which is fresh for a QWERTY Blackberry Bold. I indeed like this addition as it makes a number of things lighter/swifter, while preserving the overall feel and (work) efficiency of the Bold 9700. Being able to tap an element on the screen is often much swifter than using the trackpad.

Having a physical keyboard comes at a steep price: less screen surface

That said, you will have to prepare yourself for the loss of pretty much half the screen real estate when compared to a keyboard-less smartphone (see above photo). Readability of apps and web pages will be greatly affected. It’s a very harsh choice, but one that may be worth it if you can make it up in keyboard productivity.

The trackpad and buttons are good, but that surface would be better used for the display

Trackpad: Albeit the touchscreen makes things like selecting an app much swifter, I still like using the trackpad to scroll up and down lists on this Blackberry. I also use it to confirm choices (press OK/Come in). The optical trackpad quality is high and its accuracy is good. No complaints there.

Basic Functions

Dialing, Contacts (excellent): the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is very efficient at dialing numbers or contacts, especially if you have a large number of contacts. There’s no need to launch a “phone app” to dial: just type the number (there’s no need to press the ALT key) and the “call” button, or directly type a contact name (without launching the “Contacts” app). There’s only one way to call someone swifter: Android’s desktop “Direct Dial” shortcut.

Call Audio Quality (OK): During calls, the sound quality in the earpiece was decent, albeit not particularly good or bad. The sound was noisy enough to be used in a somewhat noisy environment like a busy restaurant, which is good. On speaker mode, the speaker was fairly noisy and should work in mildly noisy places like busy offices and in the street.

“Favorites” are a convenient way to sort apps

Favorites: I like the fact that apps can be categorized as “favorties”. I use this feature to categorize the apps that I use the most, so that they end up in a clean Favorites screen for a quick selection. If there are too many apps, I just type a few letters of the name, and the universal search finds the app for me. I would typically not do that as a very first option on a unspoiled touch phone, but the QWERTY keyboard makes keyword search very efficient.

World phone: This particular variant of the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Series is the 9930, the Verizon/CDMA version. It has a slot for a SIM card and is considered to be a “world phone” because it can work on both UMTS and CDMA networks over the world. When you are outside the USA, you have two options: 1/keep your SIM and use your Verizon number. Two/Buy a local SIM card and use local rates – but your Verizon number is not accessible anymore. It’s excellent for anyone who travels a lot.

Blackberry OS 7

Blackberry has done a lot of work under the good, and has provided many fresh application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers, but for the end-user, Blackberry OS7 mostly feels like OS6. That said, there are a few notable differences:

Fresh Web Browser: The fresh Blackberry browser now has a much higher Javascript spectacle, can run Adobe Flash and supports HTML5 – at least, in theory. In practice, Adobe Flash is not installed and there is presently no way to download it from the App World (store). It may be available only after the phone starts shipping. We’ll see.

The browser’s web page rendering is very good, and the page loading speed is comparable to competitors on iOS and Android. The only sacrifice that Bold nine thousand nine hundred users have to concede is the display real estate. With a much smaller display surface, even mobile websites are challenging to read. You either miss half of the page, or it is compressed and characters are very little.

OpenGL ES Two.0: RIM has ultimately added support for OpenGL ES Two.0, a programming interface that lets game developer use 3D graphics hardware. That said, there is not much to see at the moment. Only time will tell if the platform will get cool games.

NFC: Near Field Communication is also a fresh feature. It has appeared on the Nexus S a while back, and as of today, it’s not yet very useful, but in the future, it could be used for payment or information download at kiosks and places like that.

In the end, Blackberry OS7 brings a good share of significant improvements, but I would not call them “breakthrough”.

Critical Apps

Email (Excellent): It’s not surprising, but the email practice on the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is nothing brief of excellent.

The nice display and the readable font makes it effortless on the eye (it does well outdoors too), and the keyboard shortcuts (‘r’ to reply, ‘f’ to forward, shift+’t’ to get to the top of the list…) makes a world of difference to those who treat a lot of emails. Obviously, once the typing has began, the Bold nine thousand nine hundred leaves touch phones in the dust in terms of productivity.

There are things that RIM should improve upon. For example, it is possible to select numerous message for curation. However, the selection only works with contiguous blocks of emails, which is not always efficient. The fix could be as elementary as adding a checkbox for each email item so that the user can choose emails randomly before performing a group operation on them.

Blackberry also has a “word substitution” feature that can greatly accelerate your email productivity. For example, I can configure the email app to always substitute “ug” by “Ubergizmo” as soon as I type “ug” and press the Space key. Depending on how you build your own acronym system, you may be able to write using “SMS language”, but still end up with decent spelling and grammar. You can substitute any text, like “myaddy” for your utter address etc…

Maps (average): The Map application is much swifter than the one I attempted on the Blackberry Bold 9700, and it mostly gets the job done. That said, we’re very far from Google Maps on Android. Relative to the latest version of Google Maps, the Blackberry Maps app looks a bit antiquated. If you have never used a Blackberry before, the closest comparison would be using Mapquest.com versus Google Maps. Google Maps on latest Android devices is quicker, has more features, and phones with fatter screen do provide a larger, more readable map. I have noticed that Google is increasingly taking advantage of Google Maps to differentiate its own platform, which is fair game of course.

Facebook (average): The Facebook practice is minimal, and albeit most of the significant features (Like, Comment, Share…) are there, the layout and design of the Facebook App are not excellent. Also, the Facebook photo albums don’t seem to be available from the app. In the end, the app is adequately evolved to update your status and check or interact with the news feed, but the user practice isn’t good.

Google Talk (text only): There is no official (and free) Skype application on Blackberry, but there are a number of paid alternatives that you may look into. In any case, you can leave behind about video-chats as there is no webcam on the front. I haven’t found a good and free VOIP solution, which is too bad because contesting platforms do provide those. Skype or Google Talk can be very handy when traveling overseas, or for saving a buck when calling from a WiFi location.

Blackberry Talk (very good): Blackberry’s own talk software is one of the best apps that RIM ever come with. The main reason is that it comes pre-installed on every Blackberry phone, and it is almost as reliable as SMS among Blackberry users. That said, as RIM’s market share goes down, users should rely on other solutions, such as Google Talk or other IM systems – or maybe SMS. If your contacts are using Blackberry, this is as good as it gets in terms of text messaging, and there’s no cost associated to it.

Photo & Movie (Good)

Photo taken in good lighting conditions with the Bold 9900

In photo/movie mode, the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is agreeable to use. The shutter reacts quickly and the movie mode starts and stops in a timely style, which is always nice. The photo quality is good on a sunny day, or when there is sufficient lighting. When lighting is dimmer, things get raunchy pretty quickly, but RIM has tweaked the camera to be usable in low-light: the trade off is that the picture will get very grainy (as seen below), but it’s mostly OK if you are going to share it on the web in low-resolution (640×480 or so) as the downscaling of the photo takes out a lot (but not all) of the noise.

In dim lighting, photos becomes much more noisy – even after a size reduction

The same is pretty much true for movie capture. Even in dim lighting, the Bold nine thousand seven hundred pretty much captures what you see, and most of the grain will most likely be blurred by the video-compression. Overall, I would say that this is a progress when compared to the previous Bold, and it’s comparable to many latest smartphones out there. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s better -and much worse- out there. But imaging won’t give the nine thousand nine hundred an edge over the competition.

Entertainment

The Bold nine thousand nine hundred had no problems playing this DVD-quality movie

Movie Playback: The Bold nine thousand nine hundred can play DVD-quality MPEG4 files without any problems. I also assume that it can play 720p files (unknown maximum bitrate) as it captures 720p files from its camera. In any case, without movie output, playing back HD files is not all that useful, except if you want to avoid movie conversion to begin with.

Right now, RIM does not have a movie store, so finding “legitimate” content may prove more difficult, or at least not as convenient, than platforms which have a built-in media store.

The game selection is very (very!) puny

Games: when it comes to movie games, there isn’t much to play with. The game selection in the app store is meager, and right now, I’m not observing developers running to port/build games to RIM’s platform. The extra handicap of the Bold nine thousand nine hundred is obviously its smaller-sized display. Conventional touch controls may not work as intended, especially two transferred controls, as they may require too much space or precise finger motility. If you want a gaming machine – just get something else.

Speaker Quality (very good): in an office environment, the speaker sound is very good. It’s not the loudest that we’ve heard, but the sound stays relatively crisp, even at maximum volume – that’s superb for listening to music, albeit I uncommonly use the loudspeaker for that purpose. The speaker is placed in the back, just at the base of the battery cover.

System Spectacle

The system spectacle of the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is very interesting to look at. Unluckily, we don’t have many benchmarks to measure it against, but a duo of web Javascript spectacle benchmarks are always a decent indicator.

Browsermark, Sunspider: the Javascript the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is very high. With a Sunspider score of 2703ms, it is the fastest Javascript execution that I have seen to date.

The BrowserMark* score is also remarkable, as it equals phones tooled with the dual-core Tegra two processor, which have been predominant that particular benchmark as of late. *Due to the lower screen resolution, I’m not 100% sure that this benchmark is working on the same number of pixels, so take this with a grain of salt.

Keep in mind that Javascript spectacle is a factor of hardware AND software optimizations. Good strides have been made in latest years in regards to Javascript engines, and without more synthetic benchmarks to run, it is difficult to tell how much the hardware and the software are contributing, respectively.

Overall, my perception of the spectacle is that the Bold nine thousand nine hundred responds quickly to directions, and I have not experienced have any particular issue in regards to responsiveness, even after using it for some time. The web browsing speed is comparable to modern Android and iOS devices. I find the user interface to scroll quicker than Android devices, which is good. We are in iPhone four or Windows Phone seven territory here.

Battery Life (excellent)

With my particular usage pattern (see the “Context” paragraph), I found the battery life to be excellent as the phone can stay alive for a duo of days. Other people have reported in blogs and/or forums that they got a lot less, but it’s hard to comment on that without knowing how they use the phone, and what apps are running in the background. Overall, the Bold nine thousand nine hundred feels very similar to the nine thousand seven hundred in terms of battery life – and both are excellent.

I have run a duo of apps for 30mn to see how much battery life they would consume, and the results are below. Note that usually I also attempt a game, but there was not much to chose from, so I skipped that part. The YouTube battery life is a bit better than what most smartphones would get, but keep in mind that the display has less pixels (640×480) than most modern smartphones.

30mn of Youtube movie (WiFi, no sound): 8% battery life spent

30 mn of web browsing (WiFi): 10% battery life spent

Conclusion (fine for communication, lacks entertainment abilities)

Fine! The Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred represents the pinnacle of Blackberry QWERTY design, there’s no question about that. The Bold nine thousand nine hundred improves upon the Bold nine thousand seven hundred with an even better keyboard, much better web page rendering and high-speed javascript execution. All of that is in a chassis that is better and smaller.

But… However, the Bold nine thousand nine hundred also has the same weaknesses than the nine thousand seven hundred had. It’s display is petite, and when compared to the best smartphone competitors, it still does not prevail when it comes to Mapping, Facebook, Skype or gaming. In fact, the Blackberry application eco-system is presently too petite, so it may not find support from some the most popular services like Netflix, Hulu… I think that RIM still has some room to make the display surface 30% to 50% larger (640×640 should be a minimum)

For who? Without a doubt, the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is the king of text communications, but this won’t make it the king of smartphones as computing has moved well beyond the “productivity” aspect of people’s lives. The Bold nine thousand nine hundred is a excellent phone IF your live gravitates around communication, but there’s better choices out there for gaming and entertainment.

Hopefully, this review will have provided you with enough information to make an educated decision. If there is something that I have not covered yet, please drop a comment and I’ll do my best to reply while I still have the phone with me. This also helps us write better reviews. Thanks for stopping by!

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You may also be interested by the following reviews: Samsung Galaxy S2 Review, Motorola Photon 4G Review (very good email practice), HTC Sensation Review (excellent overall phone), iPhone four Review. Head to our review category page for more reviews.

Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Review, Ubergizmo

Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Review

As the Bold nine thousand nine hundred is the latest smartphone from RIM, it is obviously also the greatest in a long line of QWERTY smartphones. Blackberry users will want to know how it performs as a Blackberry device, and others will want to know how it compares with other smartphones available on the market. We’ll go over all that, but let’s look at how RIM presents the Bold 9900: The “thinnest Blackberry yet”, with “liquid graphics” (whatever that means), “superior performance”, “captures life in HD”, “breakthrough technologies”. Those are… bold claims, but does the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Series live up to the marketing pitch? Let’s take a look. Context

Before getting into the review, let me tell you how I use the phone so that you can see where I’m coming from, and why I see things the way I do. We all have different usage patterns, so dogmatic reviews are not that useful to many readers. Instead, I’ll attempt to give you a good sense of how (and why) things worked for me, and you should be able to figure out if that will work for yourself. If you have more questions by the end of this article, please drop a comment or some feedback. I’ll do my best to address them.

Technical Highlights

Two.8” 640×480 multi-touch display (16M colors)

Blackberry seven OS

8GB of internal storage + MicroSD slot (32GB max)

Five Megapixel rear camera, 720p movie recording

GSM+UMTS (9900 model) or CDMA+UMTS (9930 model)

115 x sixty six x Ten.5mm

Outer design

The fresh Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Series keeps the overall look that has made the previous ones successful. I find the design to be neat, mostly practical and very readable. At very first glance, it is effortless to distinguish the few areas of the phone: display, physical UI buttons and keyboard. The phone is a little broader than its predecessor, but this size makes it nice to hold in the forearm (I use my left arm). My thumb grounds naturally on the trackpad, which is frequently used to choose which app I’m going to run.

Blackberry is using a metallic aluminum framework all around the phone. This is a mechanism also used by Samsung, LG and Motorola in their resent designs. It works well, and the phone feels very solid and rigid.

On the left side you will find the micro-USB and the audio jack ports. Both are at a relatively elevated position and should not interfere too much with your forearm when the phone is connected via USB. Putting the USB port lower was a mistake that has been done in uncountable phone designs.

On the right side, the volume and camera buttons are occupying the upper and lower catches sight of. In my opinion, the camera button is a bit superfluous as you can truly use it only in portrait mode, which is not the primary option for most users. Also, I happened to press it unintentionally a number of times, but in the end, the user has the option to make it “do nothing” in the settings, so it’s not a big deal.

While there is no front-facing camera (bye bye movie talk), the backside hosts a discrete five Megapixel camera with a single LED flash. The battery cover is entirely plane (with a carbon fiber texture), which is good if you want to use the phone when it is resting on a table. From a design standpoint, a curved back may have been better, but with a plane back, the user can thrust keys or tap the screen without inducing a tilt when the phone rests on a table. At the same time, the slight curve visually hides its true thickness of 0.41” (Ten.5mm), making look even thinner.

Keyboard (excellent): The keyboard is simply excellent. It is just a little bit broader than the previous Bold 9700, but in my opinion the keys feel even better. In brief, Blackberry has made the best QWERTY keyboard… even better.

For me, the difference in typing speed is yam-sized, when compared to a touch display. However, Keep in mind that not all QWERTY keyboards are equal. Blackberry’s own “Torch” smartphone keyboard is not as good as the Bold, and other slider phones are even further away. RIM has built an empire on this keyboard, and this is partly why Blackberry phones are still so popular.

The display quality is very good. It’s crisp and the colors are accurate

Display (very good): The Bold nine thousand nine hundred display is very crisp: it has a pixel density of 287pixels per inch (ppi), which is not as crisp as the iPhone 4’s three hundred twenty six ppi, but this is still very readable and acute. Unlike touch smartphones, the screen is used in landscape mode by default (instead of portrait), and the main downside of this is the diminished vertical screen real estate. Lists, documents and web pages are much shorter (see picture below).

The Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred has a touch display, which is fresh for a QWERTY Blackberry Bold. I indeed like this addition as it makes a number of things lighter/swifter, while preserving the overall feel and (work) efficiency of the Bold 9700. Being able to tap an element on the screen is often much swifter than using the trackpad.

Having a physical keyboard comes at a steep price: less screen surface

That said, you will have to prepare yourself for the loss of pretty much half the screen real estate when compared to a keyboard-less smartphone (see above pic). Readability of apps and web pages will be greatly affected. It’s a very harsh choice, but one that may be worth it if you can make it up in keyboard productivity.

The trackpad and buttons are good, but that surface would be better used for the display

Trackpad: Albeit the touchscreen makes things like selecting an app much quicker, I still like using the trackpad to scroll up and down lists on this Blackberry. I also use it to confirm choices (press OK/Inject). The optical trackpad quality is high and its accuracy is good. No complaints there.

Basic Functions

Dialing, Contacts (excellent): the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is very efficient at dialing numbers or contacts, especially if you have a large number of contacts. There’s no need to launch a “phone app” to dial: just type the number (there’s no need to press the ALT key) and the “call” button, or directly type a contact name (without launching the “Contacts” app). There’s only one way to call someone swifter: Android’s desktop “Direct Dial” shortcut.

Call Audio Quality (OK): During calls, the sound quality in the earpiece was decent, albeit not particularly good or bad. The sound was noisy enough to be used in a somewhat noisy environment like a busy restaurant, which is good. On speaker mode, the speaker was fairly noisy and should work in mildly noisy places like busy offices and in the street.

“Favorites” are a convenient way to sort apps

Favorites: I like the fact that apps can be categorized as “favorties”. I use this feature to categorize the apps that I use the most, so that they end up in a clean Favorites screen for a quick selection. If there are too many apps, I just type a few letters of the name, and the universal search finds the app for me. I would typically not do that as a very first option on a unspoiled touch phone, but the QWERTY keyboard makes keyword search very efficient.

World phone: This particular variant of the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred Series is the 9930, the Verizon/CDMA version. It has a slot for a SIM card and is considered to be a “world phone” because it can work on both UMTS and CDMA networks over the world. When you are outside the USA, you have two options: 1/keep your SIM and use your Verizon number. Two/Buy a local SIM card and use local rates – but your Verizon number is not accessible anymore. It’s good for anyone who travels a lot.

Blackberry OS 7

Blackberry has done a lot of work under the good, and has provided many fresh application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers, but for the end-user, Blackberry OS7 mostly feels like OS6. That said, there are a few notable differences:

Fresh Web Browser: The fresh Blackberry browser now has a much higher Javascript spectacle, can run Adobe Flash and supports HTML5 – at least, in theory. In practice, Adobe Flash is not installed and there is presently no way to download it from the App World (store). It may be available only after the phone starts shipping. We’ll see.

The browser’s web page rendering is very good, and the page loading speed is comparable to competitors on iOS and Android. The only sacrifice that Bold nine thousand nine hundred users have to concede is the display real estate. With a much smaller display surface, even mobile websites are challenging to read. You either miss half of the page, or it is compressed and characters are very lil’.

OpenGL ES Two.0: RIM has eventually added support for OpenGL ES Two.0, a programming interface that lets game developer use 3D graphics hardware. That said, there is not much to see at the moment. Only time will tell if the platform will get cool games.

NFC: Near Field Communication is also a fresh feature. It has appeared on the Nexus S a while back, and as of today, it’s not yet very useful, but in the future, it could be used for payment or information download at kiosks and places like that.

In the end, Blackberry OS7 brings a good share of significant improvements, but I would not call them “breakthrough”.

Critical Apps

Email (Excellent): It’s not surprising, but the email practice on the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is nothing brief of excellent.

The nice display and the readable font makes it effortless on the eye (it does well outdoors too), and the keyboard shortcuts (‘r’ to reply, ‘f’ to forward, shift+’t’ to get to the top of the list…) makes a world of difference to those who treat a lot of emails. Obviously, once the typing has commenced, the Bold nine thousand nine hundred leaves touch phones in the dust in terms of productivity.

There are things that RIM should improve upon. For example, it is possible to select numerous message for curation. However, the selection only works with contiguous blocks of emails, which is not always efficient. The fix could be as elementary as adding a checkbox for each email item so that the user can choose emails randomly before performing a group operation on them.

Blackberry also has a “word substitution” feature that can greatly accelerate your email productivity. For example, I can configure the email app to always substitute “ug” by “Ubergizmo” as soon as I type “ug” and press the Space key. Depending on how you build your own acronym system, you may be able to write using “SMS language”, but still end up with decent spelling and grammar. You can substitute any text, like “myaddy” for your total address etc…

Maps (average): The Map application is much quicker than the one I attempted on the Blackberry Bold 9700, and it mostly gets the job done. That said, we’re very far from Google Maps on Android. Relative to the latest version of Google Maps, the Blackberry Maps app looks a bit antiquated. If you have never used a Blackberry before, the closest comparison would be using Mapquest.com versus Google Maps. Google Maps on latest Android devices is swifter, has more features, and phones with fatter screen do provide a larger, more readable map. I have noticed that Google is increasingly taking advantage of Google Maps to differentiate its own platform, which is fair game of course.

Facebook (average): The Facebook practice is minimal, and albeit most of the significant features (Like, Comment, Share…) are there, the layout and design of the Facebook App are not superb. Also, the Facebook photo albums don’t seem to be available from the app. In the end, the app is adequately evolved to update your status and check or interact with the news feed, but the user practice isn’t good.

Google Talk (text only): There is no official (and free) Skype application on Blackberry, but there are a number of paid alternatives that you may look into. In any case, you can leave behind about video-chats as there is no webcam on the front. I haven’t found a good and free VOIP solution, which is too bad because contesting platforms do provide those. Skype or Google Talk can be very handy when traveling overseas, or for saving a buck when calling from a WiFi location.

Blackberry Talk (very good): Blackberry’s own talk software is one of the best apps that RIM ever come with. The main reason is that it comes pre-installed on every Blackberry phone, and it is almost as reliable as SMS among Blackberry users. That said, as RIM’s market share goes down, users should rely on other solutions, such as Google Talk or other IM systems – or maybe SMS. If your contacts are using Blackberry, this is as good as it gets in terms of text messaging, and there’s no cost associated to it.

Photo & Movie (Good)

Photo taken in good lighting conditions with the Bold 9900

In photo/movie mode, the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is agreeable to use. The shutter reacts quickly and the movie mode starts and stops in a timely style, which is always nice. The picture quality is good on a sunny day, or when there is sufficient lighting. When lighting is dimmer, things get rough pretty quickly, but RIM has tweaked the camera to be usable in low-light: the trade off is that the pic will get very grainy (as seen below), but it’s mostly OK if you are going to share it on the web in low-resolution (640×480 or so) as the downscaling of the photo takes out a lot (but not all) of the noise.

In dim lighting, photos becomes much more noisy – even after a size reduction

The same is pretty much true for movie capture. Even in dim lighting, the Bold nine thousand seven hundred pretty much captures what you see, and most of the grain will very likely be blurred by the video-compression. Overall, I would say that this is a progress when compared to the previous Bold, and it’s comparable to many latest smartphones out there. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s better -and much worse- out there. But imaging won’t give the nine thousand nine hundred an edge over the competition.

Entertainment

The Bold nine thousand nine hundred had no problems playing this DVD-quality movie

Movie Playback: The Bold nine thousand nine hundred can play DVD-quality MPEG4 files without any problems. I also assume that it can play 720p files (unknown maximum bitrate) as it captures 720p files from its camera. In any case, without movie output, playing back HD files is not all that useful, except if you want to avoid movie conversion to commence with.

Right now, RIM does not have a movie store, so finding “legitimate” content may prove more difficult, or at least not as convenient, than platforms which have a built-in media store.

The game selection is very (very!) puny

Games: when it comes to movie games, there isn’t much to play with. The game selection in the app store is meager, and right now, I’m not watching developers running to port/build games to RIM’s platform. The extra handicap of the Bold nine thousand nine hundred is obviously its smaller-sized display. Conventional touch controls may not work as intended, especially two transferred controls, as they may require too much space or precise finger movability. If you want a gaming machine – just get something else.

Speaker Quality (very good): in an office environment, the speaker sound is very good. It’s not the loudest that we’ve heard, but the sound stays relatively crisp, even at maximum volume – that’s excellent for listening to music, albeit I uncommonly use the loudspeaker for that purpose. The speaker is placed in the back, just at the base of the battery cover.

System Spectacle

The system spectacle of the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is very interesting to look at. Unluckily, we don’t have many benchmarks to measure it against, but a duo of web Javascript spectacle benchmarks are always a decent indicator.

Browsermark, Sunspider: the Javascript the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is very high. With a Sunspider score of 2703ms, it is the fastest Javascript execution that I have seen to date.

The BrowserMark* score is also remarkable, as it equals phones tooled with the dual-core Tegra two processor, which have been predominant that particular benchmark as of late. *Due to the lower screen resolution, I’m not 100% sure that this benchmark is working on the same number of pixels, so take this with a grain of salt.

Keep in mind that Javascript spectacle is a factor of hardware AND software optimizations. Excellent strides have been made in latest years in regards to Javascript engines, and without more synthetic benchmarks to run, it is difficult to tell how much the hardware and the software are contributing, respectively.

Overall, my perception of the spectacle is that the Bold nine thousand nine hundred responds quickly to guidelines, and I have not experienced have any particular issue in regards to responsiveness, even after using it for some time. The web browsing speed is comparable to modern Android and iOS devices. I find the user interface to scroll swifter than Android devices, which is superb. We are in iPhone four or Windows Phone seven territory here.

Battery Life (excellent)

With my particular usage pattern (see the “Context” paragraph), I found the battery life to be excellent as the phone can stay alive for a duo of days. Other people have reported in blogs and/or forums that they got a lot less, but it’s hard to comment on that without knowing how they use the phone, and what apps are running in the background. Overall, the Bold nine thousand nine hundred feels very similar to the nine thousand seven hundred in terms of battery life – and both are excellent.

I have run a duo of apps for 30mn to see how much battery life they would consume, and the results are below. Note that usually I also attempt a game, but there was not much to chose from, so I skipped that part. The YouTube battery life is a bit better than what most smartphones would get, but keep in mind that the display has less pixels (640×480) than most modern smartphones.

30mn of Youtube movie (WiFi, no sound): 8% battery life spent

30 mn of web browsing (WiFi): 10% battery life spent

Conclusion (fine for communication, lacks entertainment abilities)

Good! The Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred represents the pinnacle of Blackberry QWERTY design, there’s no question about that. The Bold nine thousand nine hundred improves upon the Bold nine thousand seven hundred with an even better keyboard, much better web page rendering and high-speed javascript execution. All of that is in a chassis that is better and smaller.

But… However, the Bold nine thousand nine hundred also has the same weaknesses than the nine thousand seven hundred had. It’s display is petite, and when compared to the best smartphone competitors, it still does not prevail when it comes to Mapping, Facebook, Skype or gaming. In fact, the Blackberry application eco-system is presently too puny, so it may not find support from some the most popular services like Netflix, Hulu… I think that RIM still has some room to make the display surface 30% to 50% larger (640×640 should be a minimum)

For who? Without a doubt, the Blackberry Bold nine thousand nine hundred is the king of text communications, but this won’t make it the king of smartphones as computing has moved well beyond the “productivity” aspect of people’s lives. The Bold nine thousand nine hundred is a excellent phone IF your live gravitates around communication, but there’s better choices out there for gaming and entertainment.

Hopefully, this review will have provided you with enough information to make an educated decision. If there is something that I have not covered yet, please drop a comment and I’ll do my best to reply while I still have the phone with me. This also helps us write better reviews. Thanks for stopping by!

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