Is The Bold All Its Cracked Up To Be?

One Month With the Blackberry Bold

It is a truly great machine. Having been an original adopter of Crackberry – I have had one continuously since it was on the old network from SB – Yes Mobitex!

GSM was a huge improvement of the ability to use it outside the specific geographies. Now of course it is ubiquitous. I have a great picture taken early this decade when I was on the Great Wall for the first time and I had 3 bars!

So what’s different.

A faster network it can switch between 3G (UMTS), EDGE and GPRS for data. Frankly I don’t see a huge improvement in browsing over the prior EDGE/GPRS based versions. Email does come down faster. That is good.
The display of HTML based emails is nice. Although not sure its actually better or more efficient. Scrolling through an HTML based email has trouble with columns. The browser is better not necessarily noticeably faster. The media player is better, video recorder and voice recorder are definite pluses. Navigation is much improved. The UI/UE is much improved.

What is not so great.

Well there are some basic design flaws. Battery management is problematic. It can eat up battery life very quickly. If you leave the media player turned on it still thinks it needs to eat up that battery. So there are some multitasking improvements that need to be made in the SW. The layout of the device hardware has some integration issues. For example if you use the holster as I do a lot then it can cause the media player to skip a song. Its annoying. It cannot read or process PDFs automatically. It screws them up. There are other niggles which could also be a function of my inexperience with the device. I do long for the simple days when I had just instant on email. I still get it but there are now layers between. My biggest objection is the battery life. So losing power without an explanation means that you have to worry about it. I want a device that has at least 48 hours of normal usage before a charge. The Camera could be much better than it is – 2MB is pretty weak. At least a 5MB should be the standard. Finally the system has a habit of freezing if too much is going on at the same time. Nasty.

Overall impression

Impressive device. I am glad I waited for it. Its still not without imperfections. It needs a clean up V2.0 version that addresses some of the shortcomings. But overall a credible device. If you have a Curve – then this is an improvement but not massive.

Still I am glad I got it. If you are wanting one. Wait for a bit until the next batch of machines and the revised SW is out.

Cheers