A closer look at the new Blackberry Bold 9700 betrays affinity with features of other RIM Blackberry handsets out there but with many of the missing or inadequate features complained about but corrected quite satisfactorily.
You now have WiFi support where it’s absent in the Tour 9639 handset. You get 3G where the Curve 8900 is not capable. Then you have a better performing 3.2 megapixel camera when its first generation Bold handset has a mediocre one. RIM seems to have put into the second generation Blackberry Bold the best features from these handsets and filled out the missing parts.
The result is a stunningly versatile and capable smartphone that should have been what its predecessors had. As it should, the Blackberry Bold is its latest flagship model. T-Mobile and AT&T in the US already has the handset ready for distribution starting the 11th of November with an off-contract price of $599. An official announcement from RIM is expected this week. This should hint at its European price.
Features
Some bits of information from T-Mobile confirm that the Blackberry Bold will carry the TeleNav GPS Navigator and have the Amazon MP3 store access bundled. No official announcement from RIM until the last week of October but with the many product leaks on the net, we can deduce the Bold to have some new features as well as typical ones we’ve come to expect on mobile phones.
This, apart from Blackberry’s strength as a communications tool on the road that corporate mobile executives just love and this is the access to corporate emails through their Blackberry Enterprise Server and Blackberry Internet Service. This remains to day as the Blackberry look and functions have been emulated by many mobile phone makers wanting to break into the corporate markets.
The handset will have the same touch sensitive trackpad found on the Curve 8520 instead of the more common trackball on its other models. Differentiating it as a flagship model is a piece of leather pasted on its back cover to give some air of class to the handset. It’s a quad-band 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE and a 3G/UMTS with HSDPA and HSUPA for high speed internet surfing and downloading.
Beneath its slim and sleek body design that looks smaller than any other Blackberry handsets is a Texas Instrument Tavor processor that could be running at a higher clock speed than its Bold predecessor’s 624 MHz. We’re still waiting for RIM’s confirmation on this with an official release of the handset’s technical specification.
There’s the usual proprietary multitasking platform on it 5th version, the OS 5.0. You also get GPS, WiFi 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 which we assume has A2DP support for wireless stereo headsets and EDR for high speed data transfer. While targeted to the more serious and still executives, the handset conforms to a near universal demand for an imaging smartphone with a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash said to have better resolution than Blackberry’s previous attempts. There might even be geo-tagging courtesy of its built-in GPS receiver.
The Blackberry Bold 9500 has a rather small internal RAM of just 256 MB but this gets up to 16Gb or 32GBm, whichever is available, from its microSD external memory expansion support. You just have to open the back cover to insert the memory card – a bit inconvenient if you frequently have to do that, though many pundits think its better that way as the lesser the openings, the lesser chances of dirt getting into the handset.
Conclusion
We just have to wait a little longer for the official announcement and the more thorough technical details to confirm all these product leaks on the net. But from what we see, this is the Blackberry to own for executives thinking of getting or upgrading to one. This has the making of being the best Blackberry for now.
Blackberry Bold 9700 Links:
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