Sadly, the BlackBerry Bold 9930 is the sweetest BlackBerry we’ve ever seen. I say “sadly” because it’s clear the Bold 9930’s time in the spotlight has already passed, even though it’s a brand new phone, and an obvious upgrade for anyone with an older Bold or Curve. it also offers the fastest processor RIM has ever deployed in a smartphone, plus a sharper touch screen and HD video recording. but its numerous software-related limitations mean the Bold 9930 is really only for the BlackBerry faithful. It’s not just about the world moving to full touch screen phones; plenty of folks prefer hardware keyboards, and not everyone loves big, hulking slider phones. Others swear by BlackBerry email, already have BES servers at work, and have IT departments well versed in deploying and managing these devices. instead, it’s about software; specifically, about the OS, and about apps: from shopping and buying them, to the user experience and features they deliver. It’s here that the BlackBerry Bold 9930 still fails miserably.
Design, Connectivity, and call Quality I’m getting ahead of myself, so first let’s look at the phone. Photos don’t do it justice. thin, sleek, and expensive-feeling, with an aluminum metal band around the sides, the Bold 9930 is a classy handset fit for an executive’s desk or boardroom table. it measures 4.5 by 2.6 by 0.4 inches and weighs 4.6 ounces. It’s slightly wider and thinner than earlier Bolds, which is a good thing, because it allows for a bigger screen: 2.8 inches, to be exact, with an ultra-sharp 640-by-480-pixel resolution. That’s still small, but enough resolution to make fonts almost as crisp as what you’d find on an iPhone 4’s Retina display. It’s also a glass capacitive touch screen, and includes RIM’s now-typical trackpad underneath. You can navigate this thing just about any way you want. (Unless you still want the wheel; sadly, I don’t think that’s ever coming back, for all you die-hards out there.)
The backlit QWERTY keyboard is just fabulous. the keys still aren’t separated like on a Curve. but they’re even larger than before, and their well-tuned feel and response makes messaging about as close to a pleasure as it can be on a phone.
The Bold 9930 is a true world phone; it’s a dual-band EVDO Rev A (800/1900 MHz), quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), and dual-band HSDPA (900/2100 MHz) device, meaning it can hit 3G data speeds both here and overseas with the right data plan. You also get 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi at 2.4GHz, and a/n Wi-Fi at 5GHz, which should fit perfectly into just about any existing corporate Wi-Fi network. the only thing missing is 4G; RIM has committed to developing 4G LTE devices, but so far the only noise we’ve heard about it is confined to the QNX-powered Playbook.
One place that the Bold 9930 isn’t a clear upgrade from earlier models is in call quality, which was mixed in my tests. Callers sounded clear and bright, but a little noisy in the earpiece; each syllable had a light wash of static behind it whenever the person spoke. Callers said my own voice had the same problem; in back-to-back comparisons with an iPhone 4, transmissions through the mic sounded a bit less clear and distinct. Reception was solid. Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Era headset ($129, 4 stars), and the Nuance-powered voice dialing worked perfectly over Bluetooth without training. the speakerphone was just okay; it sounded warm and was reasonably loud enough for outdoor use, but there was some distortion at the highest volume setting. Battery life was excellent at 7 hours and 26 minutes of talk time.
User Interface, Messaging, and Apps as you’ve probably heard, BlackBerry OS 7 is an evolutionary update; we won’t see real progress on this platform until QNX arrives. That means using the Bold 9930 is comforting in its familiarity, but also quite frustrating at times. A bar of icons across the bottom is actually the partially hidden main menu; swipe it up and you’ll see several rows of extra icons. You can also swipe to the left or right to see various groups of icons, such as Favorites or Frequent. Everything is smoothly animated and looks good, thanks to the new “Liquid Graphics” engine, and the voice-activated universal search is a welcome addition. but once you get down to business and begin changing settings or firing up apps, the UI itself is basically the same as before: you pop up menus, scroll to a particular choice, and select it, just like with every BlackBerry over the past decade. it seems RIM added even more pages of settings with even more fiddly submenus, this to an OS that had too many to begin with. during the review, I also agreed to more than half a dozen EULAs, each of which you must scroll all the way through before you’re allowed to accept it. (Tip: the spacebar speeds this process up somewhat.)
On the other hand, BlackBerrys rule as messaging devices. the Bold 9930 handle all kinds of business and personal e-mail accounts with aplomb, with one exception: Microsoft Exchange Server sync is problematic unless you have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server at your company. the Facebook and Twitter clients are quite usable, and you can set the Bold 9930 to deliver status updates to the universal inbox along with email and instant messages. Under the hood, things really cook; the CPU is a single-core, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. nearly every task I tried occurred almost instantaneously. (BlackBerry OS 7 can’t take advantage of dual-core processors anyway; anything faster would have been wasted.) the Bold 9930 also boasts an NFC chip, though I couldn’t find anything to test it with.
The new WebKit browser works just like you’d expect. It’s reasonably quick, it responds instantly to scrolling and pinch zoom gestures, and desktop HTML, WebKit, and WAP pages all look sharp and detailed. Finally, it’s the real deal. There’s no Flash support, and still no accelerometer, so you can’t tilt the phone to view a page lengthwise, but a 2.8-inch screen won’t match the 3.5 to 4.3-inch panels you’ll find on full touch screen phones anyway. but at least in other respects, the browser is now on par with the competition, if not superior in any way.
I wish I could say the same about BlackBerry App World, which is Research In Motion’s single biggest problem right now. It’s slow to load, difficult to browse, and full of mediocre apps that are generally clunky and not as powerful as their iOS and Android counterparts. nothing about BlackBerry OS 7 improves any of this. Don’t look for much in the way of more powerful apps for the Bold 9930, either. any developers considering taking advantage of its faster CPU and sharp touch screen will likely crunch the numbers and just hold out for QNX.