Power the passions you pursue with a smartphone that expresses your style and simplifies your life.The BlackBerry® Bold™ smartphone embodies elegant design — without sacrificing the features or functionality you expect from a premium smartphone.
| Size: | 4.48 x 2.6 x 0.59 inches (LxWxD) |
| Weight: | 4.8 oz |
| Display: | Half VGA resolution 480 x 320 pixel color display, Transmissive TFT LCD, supports over 65,000 colors, Font size (user selectable), Backlighting, Light sensing screen |
The BlackBerry Bold is RIM’s most powerful, polished handset ever. With 3G, a glossy new UI, a real web browser, serious hardware and an almost beautiful body, the Bold doesn’t redefine the BlackBerry experience, but it does elevate to the highest point its ever been.As many coats of polish as RIM has thickly layered on the Bold, it is still a BlackBerry, with all of its suit-and-tie DNA fully intact. Fundamentally, it works and plays just like every other BlackBerry, but with a load of small-to-medium improvements, updates and tweaks that add up to a richer, more refined phone that also looks far better than the rest while doing its thing.The Bold actually makes good use of folders right out of the box with folders for Music, Applications (an odd assortment of preloaded programs that didn’t make in onto centre stage), Games, Downloads (where your third-party apps reside, until you move them elsewhere) and Setup (which contains the setup routines for Wi-Fi, email and Bluetooth).It’s hands-down the best looking phone RIM has put out, not to mention one of the most attractive pieces of kit on the whole market, even if the clean chrome on black is borrowed from another phone (and we’re not saying it is). It looks like an incredibly modern business device, what you imagine people with more important jobs than you would carry to conduct business that’s more important than yours, while talking to their accountant about how much fatter their bank account is than yours. It exudes power. Welcome to 2008, RIM design department.
RIM has two styles of keyboard for its full QWERTY BlackBerrys (discounting the hybrid ‘SureType’ pattern of the Pearl). The Curve sports individual keys, while the 8800 series removes the gap between each key so they’re all nestled tight next to one another.Most BlackBerry users cite this as a key advantage of the Curve. Yet while the Bold adopts the 8800-style keyboard, RIM has somehow finessed the design to make it far more usable. Each keypress is soft without being squishy, and a little quieter than when you’re tapping away on the Curve.The Bold makes smart use of the extra screen real estate and increased resolution by revamping the UI with larger icons and a more elegant and rounded system font (you also now get a live preview of the selected font before committing to your choice).The screen is complemented by the new look of the BlackBerry OS 4.6. This is two revision points ahead of the current 4.4.x generation, and has been fine-tuned for the Bold’s higher resolution (OS 4.5 brings many of the core features to existing BlackBerry devices but you’ll have to wait for your carrier to offer the OS, and we’d suggest you don’t hold your breath).
It has everything you want: 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi. Despite earlier reports that it suffered from bad 3G problems, I found that it was more consistent and reliable with its 3G connection. It wasn’t uncommon to grab four bars of signal where, say, the iPhone only saw one. (I realize bars are not standardized or totally accurate, but the disparity between the two was often significant, two or more bars.) In drive-testing, handoff went smoothly. GPS was slower than I would’ve liked, more often than not taking up to a minute to get a lock, and the maps app could be snappier (and prettier) than it is, but it’ll do. At least on AT&T it will immediately have a decent navigator application.It’s now had a complete rewrite to support iPhone-like full-page browsing, meaning you can view proper web sites exactly as you would on a desktop PC. Like an iPhone, you zoom in on the area you want to read, and the combination of cursor and trackball makes this very easy, and far quicker than the equivalent feature on Nokia handsets like the N95 and E71.Beyond the browser you get the usual bouquet of PDA applications. There is also a Facebook client, Google Maps client and a few games. Third party applications for the BlackBerry are growing in number, but still lag behind both the Windows Mobile and iPhone platforms for choice.In addition to 3G and HSDPA support, the Bold offers 802.11 a, b and g Wi-Fi. GPS support is very good, and even coped well inside buildings.
Specifications:
Navigation: Trackball, QWERTY (Keyboard), Keyboard backlighting
User Interface: Intuitive icons and menus
Memory: 1GB On-board + 128 MB Flash, Expandable memory – support for microSD card
Microprocessor: No
Modem: Embedded RIM® wireless modem, Tethered modem capability
Email Integrations:
- Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Microsoft® Exchange
- Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for IBM® Lotus® Domino®
- Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Novell® GroupWise®
- Integrates with an existing enterprise email account
- Integrates with existing personal email account
- Integrates with optional new device account
Device Security:
- Password protection and keyboard lock
- Support for AES or Triple DES encryption when integrated with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server
- FIPS 140-2 Validated (FIPS validation)
- Optional support for S/MIME
Network:
- Wi-Fi: 802.11a/b/g
- UMTS: 2100/1900/850 MHz
- North America: 850 MHz GSM/GPRS networks
- North America: 1900MHz GSM®/GPRS networks
- Europe/Asia Pacific: 1800MHz GSM/GPRS networks
- Europe/Asia Pacific: 900MHz GSM/GPRS networks
- EDGE networks
- HSDPA networks
