BlackBerry Bold Touch 9930

BLACKBERRY BOLD TOUCH 9930 REVIEW

RIM used its 2011 BlackBerry World even in Orlando to unveil its latest CDMA phone, the fast and powerful Bold 9930. Thin and light, the new Bold will run the new BlackBerry 7 operating system, showcasing new social features and new hardware. We have to give RIM serious credit. Measuring just 0.4 inches thick, the Bold 9930 is the thinnest BlackBerry yet. This pocket-friendly 4.6-ounce device definitely shouldn't stay hidden. That's because this handset has the most beautiful industrial design RIM has ever produced. A sophisticated and sturdy brushed metal band wraps around the Bold 9930, and the back has a black soft-touch finish around the edges with a clear acrylic cover in the middle that seems to hover over the BlackBerry logo. From the way light reflects off the keyboard frets to its swooping curves, the 9930 looks like a work of art. An optical trackpad is in the middle of those buttons, which complements the touchscreen by letting you manipulate the cursor or scroll through lists with ease. We found it to be a little erratic, so we adjusted the sensitivity in the settings. The typing experience on the BlackBerry Bold 9930 is the smartphone equivalent of a ThinkPad. The keys are plenty large, provide lots of travel, and offer fantastic tactile feedback. We also appreciate the way each individual key is sculpted with a slight curve for easier gripping. Like all BlackBerrys, you can enter the @ symbol in email addresses by pressing the spacebar, and enter periods by pressing it twice. Not only does the 9930's keyboard make it easier to send messages than a touchscreen-only device, we could easily take notes during meetings. With a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, the Bold 9930's 2.8-inch display is very sharp for its size. The menus looked very crisp on this phone, and the viewing angles were wide when watching the Contagion trailer on YouTube. The problem is that the screen is so small that you need to zoom in on most websites to read the articles. The tiny LCD also makes other activities like playing games and watching videos feel a little claustrophobic. The BlackBerry 7 OS that powers the Bold 9930 looks nearly identical to BlackBerrry 6, with most of the upgrades being under the hood. Like before, you'll find multiple homescreens that let you easily scroll between all of your apps and various subgroups, including Favorites, Media, Downloads, and Frequent. You can decide how many rows of apps you'd like to appear at one time (up to three) by dragging the homescreen title bar up or down. Underneath the time on the homescreen you'll see a scoreboard of sorts that displays how many messages you have waiting from various services. Tapping on that line launches a notification window that displays email, text messages, calendar entries, missed calls, and Facebook and Twitter updates. The latter two options tie into the Social Feeds app, which streams your Facebook and Twitter feeds while directing you to dedicated apps for those services when you want to dig deeper. You get a beefed up web browser with enhanced HTML 5 support (but no Flash) and voice search capability in Universal Search, as well as support for NFC and augmented reality apps. RIM hasn't aligned itself with a partner for making mobile payments like Google Wallet, so for now the company is just saying you can use NFC to connect with other NFC-enabled devices and smart tags. Overall, the interface is relatively simple to navigate but feels as though a lot of innovations have been tacked onto an old design. As with all BlackBerrys, messaging is front and center with the Bold 9930. You can choose to look at all your messages in a unified view or in separate accounts (Exchange, Yahoo, etc.). RIM bundles Documents to Go for viewing and editing Office documents, as well as for viewing PDFs. Once again, though, the small screen makes reading attachments a chore, especially spreadsheets. To help you keep in touch with friends, the Bold 9930 comes with three instant messaging clients: Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk. All of these apps integrate with the comprehensive Social Feeds app. Packing a 1.2-GHz Qualcomm processor and 768MB of RAM, the Bold 9930 is easily the fastest BlackBerry we've tested. Opening and switching between apps felt instantaneous, and the camera fires up in less than two seconds. We also didn't notice any lag when playing a game of Brick Breaker while listening to the music player in the background. However, we did notice some hiccups when surfing the web (see below). RIM equips the Bold 9930 with 8GB of RAM, which is expandable up to 32GB. One of the highlights of the Bold 9930 is its "next-generation" web browser, which is supposed to offer optimized zooming and panning. We wouldn't call it optimized at all. In fact, on sites such as TechCrunch the Bold 9930 stuttered as it zoomed in and zoomed in too far. We were also frustrated by the fact that we often had to tap the address bar two or three times before we could enter a new address. On the plus side, we like the way this smartphone handles tabs. You just press the number to the right of the address bar to create new tabs or switch between them. And despite being saddled with a 3G connection, the Bold 9930 loaded most web pages quickly, taking between 6 and 7 seconds to load mobile sites such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com, and CNN.com. It took the device about 20 seconds to load the full Laptopmag.com site. Still, 4G LTE phones on Verizon's network take only 4 seconds to load mobile sites. It's pretty telling that several of the top apps in BlackBerry App World don't have a rating above three stars. Users want them because they're recognizable names, but they're not as robust or intuitive as their counterparts on other platforms. Take the Twitter app. You don't even see a field for posting updates on the main screen. Instead, you need to press the menu button and then click Compose Tweet. RIM also includes a handful of its own apps, such as BlackBerry Protect for locating and remotely locking and wiping a lost device. You also get MemoPad, Tasks, and a Voice Notes recorder. Verizon includes VZ Navigator for navigation. Bing handles the search duties, and TomTom powers the Maps application. The Bold 9930 comes with several options to keep you entertained between emails and tweets. There's Slacker for streaming Internet radio and the Amazon MP3 store for purchasing tracks. You'll also find shortcuts to V Cast Music and V Cast Video. We were particularly impressed with this smartphone's booming speaker. When we fired up 311's "Amber" on Slacker, we had to close our office door because it was so loud. We have mixed feelings about the Bold 9930's 5-MP camera. It shoots quickly, but several images turned out fuzzy. The phone also had problems adjusting to different lighting conditions, which resulted in some photos looking darker than they should have. On the other hand, one shot we took outdoors of two friends looked crisp enough to print, and the flash did a good job of capturing a family member blowing out birthday candles. The 720p camcorder on the Bold 9930 captured smooth and detailed footage outdoors, and the phone's mic was sensitive enough to pick up chirping crickets. Indoors, our clips came out dark, though engaging the video light helped a little. We'd like to see RIM use backside illuminated sensors on its next-gen smartphones. Making calls on the Bold 9930 using Verizon Wireless' network was a pleasure. Other callers said we sounded just as clear as when using our office landline. On our end, we didn't experience any clipping, though on one occasion we heard our voice echoing back. If you use your phone in the car much, you'll love how loud this device's speakerphone gets. RIM and Verizon also promise an upgrade that will provide push-to-talk capability. The Bold 9930 features a 1230mAh battery that's rated for 6.6 hours of talk time. In our testing, which involved light web surfing, checking email and social networks, and streaming music throughout the course of a day, the phone still had 35 percent juice 12 hours after being unplugged. That's much better than the typical Android phone, which usually needs to be recharged by the evening. Blackberry is countered as the high stacked up cellular telephone organization. They generate remarkable styles and plans of handsets. Keeping in mind the end goal to express their inventiveness, they generally attempt to do something new in the field of versatile processing. By the name of Blackberry Bold Touch 9930, they have presented a high tech unit. The telephone is fit for both the offices like touch and sort in the meantime. The touch screen ability plus the full QWERTY console can get through the restrictions.

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