I just got this phone yesterday and I can say it is definitely my favorite Blackberry so far. The camera is amazing and 6.0 OS is blazing fast! Heres a review from www.infosyncworld.com that pretty much explains it all!
BlackBerry Bold 9780 Design
The BlackBerry Bold 9780 is what we call a candybar type phone, equipped with a full QWERTY keyboard, 2.5-inch HVGA screen, and optical track pad/button panel, all located on the front side. The Bold is about the width of an iPhone 3G and slighty thicker than most capacitive touchscreen smartphones on the market today. However, the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is a bit shorter than most phones, making it an unobtrusive pocket companion. In back, the Bold has a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, and the phone is built for durability—it’s certainly one of the better crafted devices on the market today.
The few issues we had with the Bold were minor. The first had to do with the Power/Lock button, which is covertly hidden atop the LCD screen, and mirrors the Mute button on the other side. It’s far too easy to inadvertently hit the Power/Lock button, especially if it’s in a pocket, so the pocket-dialing potential with the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is fairly high. Also, it’s difficult to snap a picture using the optical track pad because our thumb wandered over to neighboring camera commands. We recommend using the Camera button located on the side of the phone.
If you’ve ever used a BlackBerry keyboard, you know that the keys are pretty darn small. They take some getting used to, especially if you don’t have slender elf fingers, however, all it takes is a little training to achieve that classic crackberry finger-tapping fury. The Bold 9780 has two assignable Convenience Keys that can be set to a variety of actions like BB Messenger, Texts, Brick Breaker, etc. The phone also has a 3.5mm audio jack, naked USB terminal, and MicroSD card slot mounted above the battery so there’s no need to remove it. The phone comes with a 2GB MicroSD card and has a 32GB MicroSD card capacity.
BlackBerry Bold 9780 Software and Interface
The centerpiece on this main course table is BlackBerry 6, and boy howdy, what an improvement. First let’s look at what we’re dealing with under the hood. The BlackBerry Bold 9780 has a 624MHz processor with 512MB of RAM, suffice to say it’s not the highest horsepower engine on the Smartphone Speedway. But BlackBerry 6 is so well designed and smooth, that the Bold actually seems faster. We did not experience the dreaded BlackBerry jitters, which in the past had caused never-ending program loads and exceedingly slow interface navigation. The BlackBerry Bold 9780 belongs to a new breed of RIM soldiers, so there’s nothing to fear.
We’ll start off with the universal search, which enabled us to find anything on the phone. From the home screen we could begin typing anything from names to numbers and the BlackBerry Bold 9780 would automatically search what we inputted. The top Connections menu has been drastically cleaned up, organizing Mobile Network, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Alarm options. Connecting to a Wi-Fi network was a breeze on the Bold 9780, compared to BlackBerrys of yesteryear. There’s also a Status bar bookended by Profiles and Search that displays our Twitter, MySpace, Messenger, facebook and other notifications with a scrollable dropdown menu.
This is part of BlackBerry’s attempt to play Social Networking catchup, and there’s even a Social Feeds application that includes RSS as well. Unfortunately, BlackBerry App World is no iTunes or Android Market, and Internet browsing on the Bold is just like any other BlackBerry with antiquated navigation. But the App Store does have Google Talk and Pandora can be downloaded from the company’s website. RIM definitely needs some work on its internet browser. But we had access to YouTube with a YouTube search function, and the Bold came preloaded with Maps and a Podcast application that gave us access to tons of free podcasts.
For music, we now have album art, email brings Exchange support, and messaging was a joy with side scrolling menus that allowed us to attach a multitude of files including a picture, video, location, audio file, contact, voice note, or appointment. One minor gripe about the BlackBerry Bold 9780 was its optical track pad. We missed the optical track ball at times, especially when we went to make a selection and ended up overshooting our intended selection. But for the most part, the BlackBerry Bold 9780′s software and interface have been substantially improved.
BlackBerry Bold 9780 Call Quality/Battery Life
We can always count on a BlackBerry when it comes to quality sound. The BlackBerry Bold 9780 was no different from the best BlackBerry has to offer when it comes to call quality. Voices were clean and did not exhibit overdoses of bass or treble—it was a fine-tuned medium that enabled us to withstand hours of talking, even with people who had extremely annoying voices.
As far as battery life, the BlackBerry Bold has 80% life left as we type this line. The dang thing has been off of its charger for over a day with lots of camera, Internet browsing, and fiddling around. This is about as good as you can get for battery life, and we wouldn’t expect any less out of BlackBerry. To put it in perspective, we also have a Samsung Focus WP7 smartphone sitting here with 30% battery life left, after testing in identical conditions to the Bold.
BlackBerry Bold 9780 Image/Video Quality
Just like the BlackBerry Style, the Bold 9780 is equipped with a 5-megapixel camera and LED flash. We’ll tell you right now that the BlackBerry’s new camera rivals the best smartphones on the market. Exceptional still image detail from a phone, including accurate colors and surprising low light sensitivity. The Bold 9780 can expose where most other phones can’t, and its flash performance is excellent. Who would have thought BlackBerry’s camera would skyrocket like this?
Video is standard-definition VGA, but its quality is still up there. In fact, we preferred the Bold’s video quality to most other 720p phones on the market because we could tell that RIM decided to focus on quality of the pixels, not the quantity. We’re throwing out major props to BlackBerry for their latest camera.
Also, we can now shoot with a variety of Scene modes, including Close-up, Sports, Landscape, and Night, and the BlackBerry Bold 9780 has Auto Focus. The Gallery has been revamped, making it easier to scroll through images, and most of this is because of BlackBerry 6. Great camera mode on the Bold—no bones about it.
