The first BlackBerry Bold, the 9000, was a very clever smartphone, and the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the same, only on steroids. It's better in every way, with twice a much RAM and the new BlackBerry OS 5.0 to make it run faster, and streamlined so it's all meat and no fat.

 

Appearance and handling for the BlackBerry Bold 9700

Despite the larger processing power, the Bold 9700 is smaller and more sleek than the original. Round edging and a leather-feel back make it feel good in the hand, and the keyboard is smaller, but still as comfortable and accurate, with chrome frets separating the rows and well-placed keys.

A welcome return from the Bold are the customisable 'convenience keys' that sit on the sides of the phone and allow you to launch any program you want them to. On the top are handy lock and mute keys, and you can put the phone on standby by double clicking the mute button.

A new development for the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the trackpad, which replaces the trackball other BlackBerry devices have featured. It's very responsive: you can navigate round the screen using light strokes, and press the trackpad to select or okay. We also love that the charger port is a miniUSB – the closest thing there is to a universal charger.
The user interface is intuitive and simple; just click the Menu button on the front of the phone to bring up all the menu options. A heap of shortcuts minimise clicking, and they are all listed in the Help menu.

Our main gripe is that, other than adding your six most used programs to the shortcut bar,  you can't customise the home screen much. Otherwise you're left with the manufacturer's settings. You can download apps but the range is small compared to the iPhone and Android. But the new OS has support for BlackBerry Widget, so hopefully some new apps will soon become available.

 

Media, internet and camera for the BlackBerry Bold 9700

Speeding up the internet experience are a full HTML browser with faster JavaScript and CSS processing, so full web pages load up as quickly as on a desktop PC. The trackpad is a good alternative to touch-screen browsing, letting you move around with ease. The 2.44-inch screen makes browsing somewhat difficult as you have to rather a lot of scrolling to read the zoomed-in page, but that's the price you pay for a smaller handset.

Watching movies is also affected by the size of the screen, but the 480x360-pixel resolution gives you a crisp picture with great colours. The movie player pauses automatically and runs in the background when you switch out to take a call.

You can sync the media player with Windows Media Player and iTunes, and Desktop Manager allows you to auto-update your media libraries. There's an always-welcome 3.5mm headphones port on board, but the bundled (not in-ear) headphones worked surprisingly well.

The camera has also been improved since the Bold 9000. It's now 3.2 megapixels with flash, auto-focus and video recording, but the images are a little too sharp and colours appear muted. Just average, unfortunately. As is the video camera, although it does offer a handy video light, which we like. You can shoot in normal, black and white and sepia, and it does record sounds, just very loud ones. Sat nav is provided quickly thanks to A-GPS and BlackBerry Maps.

 

Email on the BlackBerry Bold 9700

You get the same fully-featured email as you would expect from RIM, with push-email support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL, dispelling the BlackBerry's image as simply a work tool. But, if your company runs BlackBerry's new Enterprise Server 5.0, you have access to features including follow-up flags, appointment forwarding, folder management and wireless contact synchronisation.

 

The verdict for the BlackBerry Bold 9700

Email is still the killer feature on the BlackBerry Bold 9700, and it's almost flawless. Watching movies and browsing the web are hampered somewhat by the size of the screen, although picture quality is good. We would like there to be more home-screen customisation options and more choice of downloadable apps, but all in all, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is still a powerhouse of a phone.

 

Buy the BlackBerry Bold 9700 Here