RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700 The original BlackBerry Bold 9000 cut quite a dash when it debuted last year, signalling clearly to any doubters that Research in Motion was moving the BlackBerry out of the boardroom and into the pockets and handbags of consumers who had need for its exemplary e-mail service in their day-to-day lives. BlackBerry Bold 9700 …
Right up until the moment I got my Bold 9000 last year. I came from an LG Viewty, and the BB was an absolute revelation.
Its sad to say, but I wouldn't want to be without the BB now, and the 9700 looks like good incremental improvements on an already fantastic mobile device.
This looks like a very good smartphone. I'm sorely tempted for my next upgrade, seeing as Android 2 phones are taking their time to get to market. The photo quality looks quite reasonable for a phone as well. The music application doesn't look like a schoolkid did the interface for his Key Stage 3 exam, and thus is a perfectly adequate iPod replacement alongside Blackberry Sync.
My Bold 9000 (which I love, love, love, love - after being almost sure I'd hate it coming from an 8700) does multiple zoom increments. How many depends on the page layout - seems like up to four. It'd be nice to have manual control (use vol up/down to zoom in/out perhaps?) but it's definitely not just one zoom level.
I'm wondering if you were just zooming in on columns of text, where it snaps to the column size alone, and not trying other areas of the page?
In other news, I can scarcely imagine the screen being any better than it is on the 9000. It's staggering - and somehow flawlessly viewable even in direct sunlight. When I first got the phone I probably spent 10 minutes aiming the thing around in bright sun trying to find an angle that it wouldn't work at - I kept thinking I was somehow managing to miss the direct sun angle because the image was always perfect!
Am sure this is a neat device. But BB messaging only comes alive with a BES sitting in the background. What's the point in having all this fancy hardware if you have to USB to a PC to sync your sent items, contacts and calendar?
For "work phones", OTA sync can usually be assumed, but for Joe Public it means Hosted BES at about £20 per month, plus a real chance of being further screwed by the carriers for BES provisioning (UK Voda want another £25 pm).
Compare and contrast the slew of devices with ActiveSync support, where this highly desirable functionality is already built into every Exchange server, and costs about a fiver a month from most email hosting providers.
... I loved my original Bold. Right up until I realised that the positioning of the headphone jack on the side of the device was putting huge amounts of strain on the headphones when I tried to fit the device in my pocket or bag, and eventually breaking the connections in the jack.
Two pairs of not exactly cheap headphones later I put the Bold back in the box in the cupboard and went back to my old phone. As much as I like the look of the 9700 I'm afraid I'll be steering clear of RIM devices until they actually spend some money redesigning the chassis' for how people WANT to use their phones, and not rehashing a ludite layout from the last geological time period.
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