If sending and receiving email is still on top of your list of priorities, the BlackBerry Bold is still the best in show.On this page you will find latest OS for your BlackBerry device. RIM has chosen not to deviate from its successful smartphone model and the result is easily one of the best smartphone experiences available at this time, especially for those who aren't tempted by the flood of touchscreen handsets we've seen this year. Its smaller, tighter design is welcomed, and in our opinion it is a more attractive handset overall, but without significant software improvements the user experience is very much the same.Īs we said earlier in the review, this is not a bad thing. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 retains the excellent standard we experienced this time last year when we reviewed the Bold 9000, but it improves on this formula in such subtle ways that it will be hard for current Bold users to justify an upgrade. If you don't intend to use the web browser frequently, consider turning 3G off and enjoy two or three times the battery life. Battery life is rated at six hours of talk time using 3G and its 1500mAh battery should be good for a couple of days between charges depending on your usage patterns. Reception strength is good, though it is worth noting that Telstra is yet to announce the Bold as a member of its Blue Tick club (as it did with last year's Bold), which means the 9700 might not be suitable for customers outside of metropolitan areas or large regional hubs. On other sites you might also notice text spilling over from one column and across the text in an adjacent column.Ĭall quality is good across all of our tests, though the earpiece speaker is quieter than we'd like it to be at full volume. Web browsing on the Bold is fine for surfing most of your favourite sites catching up on the news, watching YouTube videos, etc, but we did notice the Bold struggling to render certain pages correctly - CNET Australia's desktop site doesn't display all elements of the page, showing some areas of the page as black when they should be white. We did notice some considerable lag spikes, but they seemed to be confined to times when the battery was nearing depletion and we're guessing the Bold might use a power-saving setting that sacrifices performance at the end of the battery cycle. The time taken to launch an app varies depending on what is required, but moving between folders is absolutely seamless. Menu navigation is slick and its response to input is immediate. Performanceįor the most part, the new BlackBerry Bold performs superbly. Email is, as always, the core strength of the Bold 9700, but you can also read Office documents (or compose and edit them too for an extra cost), plus you can connect to your office intranet using its VPN client. If you're unfamiliar with the latest version of the BlackBerry OS you can expect everything you should need for remote business communications, as well as a little play time with a decent media player. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, the Bold 9700 runs extremely well and RIM has obviously taken an "if it's not broke, don't fix it" attitude to software for this year's releases. Our review handset reports that it is running version 5.0.0.321 of the BlackBerry OS, and though a year has elapsed since the release of its predecessor, we're finding it really difficult to spot any significant improvements in the software. The Bold 9700 sports 3.6Mbps downloads and Wi-Fi for web browsing, with the ubiquitous Bluetooth (A2DP) and USB connections included. If you've been following the progress of BlackBerrys this year you'll know that this is the first in its family of phones to feature HSDPA data speeds all year - the Pearl Flip, and Curves 89 were all 2G handsets (and the 3G BlackBerry Tour wasn't released in Australia). There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top left-hand side of the handset, an important inclusion for those who use their phones as their media players. The microSD card slot is under the battery cover, but you don't need to remove the battery to locate it, so you can hot-swap cards without shutting down. Underneath the battery cover it still has the same textured, faux-leather finish, which is a small touch we like. On the back of the phone you'll find a 3.15-megapixel camera in the same position where last year's Bold had a 2-megapixel module.
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