Boldness pays off
After all the hype surrounding the iPhone those that harbour an active dislike for Apple will be pleased to know that the Blackberry Bold is almost upon us. But although the Blackberry Bold has been heralded as an iPhone killer, I can assure you it’s not. There are things the iPhone does well and Blackberry not and places where the iPhone falls down and the Blackberry shines.
On the downside I must concede I’ve tried to use a number of Blackberry devices in the past and none have lasted more than the day or so before they were thrown back in the box in frustration.
But with the Bold it seems that it’s got its act together. The first thing you notice is that it looks like a solid cellphone. With a leather-look back and chrome sides it looks and feels as if it should cost a lot of money.
The next thing on the list is its screen. Even though it isn’t the largest you’ll find on a cellphone, it has very high resolution, meaning you’ll be amazed by how good images look. As a device for watching video it’s better than an iPod, with the exception of the iPhone and the iPod touch.
The only complaint I have about the screen is that the viewing angle is a bit restricted, meaning if you aren’t looking at it straight on, you’ll notice the screen seems to distort slightly. The good news is that on plain emails that’s not noticeable, but images and videos are more severely affected.
The real party trick of the BlackBerry remains its email capabilities. In fact, in the world of BlackBerry everything is really a nice extra. People buy its devices because they integrate seamlessly into their corporate IT systems, not because they’re pretty or sexy or play music well. In that respect the Bold is a star performer.
Setting up mail account is dead easy and reading incoming mail a pleasure to the eye, thanks mostly to its fantastic screen. However, I found trying to manage my Gmail account from the phone was quite tricky, as it doesn’t give you the option to move to folders, and reading mail on the Bold doesn’t mark the mails as “read” on the server.
You can simply delete them from the device and then at some later date move them around the server. However, that’s a minor niggle and didn’t put me off using the phone at all.
And then there’s the keyboard. I’ve never really warmed to using a QWERTY keyboard on a phone before but after a couple of weeks with the Bold I’m a changed man.
I don’t know if BlackBerry has done something specific with this device but the keys felt as if they were designed exactly right for typing with two thumbs. I hardly made any mistakes and was able to bash out SMSs and emails faster than ever before.
The biggest flaw on previous BlackBerry devices was the web browser. And while it’s vastly improved, it still isn’t up to the high standards set by Nokia and Apple. But at least the 3G connection to the Internet means that pages load much faster.
Unfortunately, there’s no pricing information yet about the Bold, as that’s set by the cellphone networks and they hadn’t released that at the time of writing.
Finweek
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