BlackBerry Bold 9000

In many ways the Blackberry is perhaps the only "locked ecosystem" business model outside Apple's media players that's worked so well. Despite facing a crippling lawsuit only a couple of years ago, RIM has grown from strength to strength and only emerged stronger. The company's choke-hold on the corporate email market is only too visible.

What is it about a BlackBerry phone that makes it so indispensable to business users? In an era of multiple smartphone platforms, how are these phones maintaining their lead? These questions were uppermost in our minds as we set about reviewing the device.

Form Factor
We don’t intend to cover the design aspects in detail as we had done that quite adequately in the preview of the handset. Click here for a more detailed perspective on the form factor. Just to reiterate, though the BlackBerry bold may seem a bit bulky, this won't be an issue for existing users looking to upgrade to the next best thing from RIM. The Bold 9000 offers a sense of elegance and class to the line.

For starters, the brilliant 480 x 320 pixel resolution screen is great for videos as well as the use of the camera. The keypad may take a little bit of getting used to if you’re transitioning from a normal handset to QWERTY, but it won’t take more than a few minutes. What we really liked is RIM’s decision to go universal with the Bold’s external connectivity options, such as a 3.5mm earphone and standard miniUSB sockets. The Pearl trackball is very handy for navigation.

A shortcut key can be assigned to a specific feature of your choice, and there's a dedicated camera key as well. The device has 1GB internal memory, but supports external memory via microSD cards. One problem is that removing the microSD card is not an easy task. This seems to be the only flaw in the handset’s design – everything else is A-OK.

Features and Performance
Interface and OS Performance
The Blackberry Bold is the most powerful unit that RIM has shipped yet. It comes with a 624 MHz Marvell processor, 128 MB of RAM for application usage, 1GB of onboard storage, and external expansion via a microSD slot. This gives the phone a clear edge over earlier versions.

Multi-tasking was smooth, with multiple applications running. Opening large document and emails was a relatively painless procedure, as the phone was able to process them quickly without issues or slowdowns.

The only issue we faced was the occasional hangup. In some rare cases, the phone's OS would simply hang with a 523 APP error and it would require us to pull out the battery to restart. That's another issue; we've used hundreds of smartphones in the past but none has been as slow when it comes to bootup time. A startup from a battery pullout can take as long as 2½ minutes.

Once it booted up the phone was thankfully smooth and responsive, and posed no issues. The Bold has received a much-needed UI upgrade from its previous iterations. The new UI looks incredibly sharp and detailed.