Specs:
BlackBerry 9700 (Onyx) is a new Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and UMTS/HSDPA smartphone. The 9700 come with a 480x360 resolution display, a 3.2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, Wi-fi (802.11 a/b/g), visual voicemail, full QWERTY keyboard, BlackBerry App World, and TeleNav GPS Navigator.
We all know that the bold 9700 represents the apogee of successive refinements that Research In Motion (RIM) has done on its phones since the release of the original Bold. The Blackberry 9700 inherits from improvements made to the Blackberry Curve 8900 and the Blackberry Tour, among others. There are small changes in design, and important changes (for the better) in terms of performance, but overall, the Blackberry Bold 9700 feels similar to the Tour or the 8900.
With Onix, our work email, calendar and contacts were synchronized over the air. We can stay connected with our friends via the Facebook apps, and we read emails continuously on the go. We can browse the web several times a day to check on news and the stock market. And, we don’t call much: only 10mn or so per day. Usage pattern is the single most important thing that affects battery life. It also shapes how we perceive, like or dislike features on a phone, so now you know.
The Bold 9700 is a nice phone that is relatively light, and feels good in the hand (and the pocket). The design is in my opinion much better than the original Bold. Its keyboard is very good for me, good keyboards are largely what makes Blackberry devices so great to use for work. The Bold 9700 keyboard is nice. It has the same design than the original Bold and feels like the Blackberry Tour’s. However, my personal preference goes to the 8900 Curve’s keyboard, which has what I think is the best keyboard of all phones. Obviously, this is a very personal view, and I can only recommend that you try typing (a long text) with one of these in a store before forming an opinion. Outside of Blackberry, I really like the design of the Palm Pixi’s keyboard.
For display, the Bold 9700 inherits from the Curve 8900 screen resolution (480x360), which is slightly higher than the original Bold (480x320). some have reported that the screen quality is better, but looking at the 9700 and 8900 side by side, I’m hard-pressed to see a difference. They are both very good and sharp. Note that because the Bold 9700 packs a bit more pixels than the iPhone in virtually half the screen surface, the image is in fact much sharper. I usually keep the screen brightness at 40 (100 is the maximum). That’s good enough in most situations and that saves power.
Finding and calling a contact is very easy as you just need to type the first few letters of a name. Dialing is also as easy, even if the numeric keys are grouped tightly, which makes it harder to use when not looking at the keyboard (driving). There’s no favorite or "most called" list, but you can access the call log. There is a voice dialing function that doesn’t work as well as Android’s, but it’s there and it might be friendlier with your voice than mine. The audio quality is very good and the volume level is relatively loud, for a smartphone. The speaker is quite loud as well, and is one of the best that we have tested recently.
Finally, the 9700 has visual voicemail with T-Mobile. The application is quite basic and not sexy at all, but it is certainly good enough for its purpose and much better that the dumb sequential voicemail.
The T-Mobile Blackberry Bold 9700 supports T-Mobile’s UMA access. If you are not familiar with the idea, this means that the phone can use an internet WiFi connection to communicate with T-Mobiles network. Think of your WiFi router as your personal cell tower. When calling via UMA, the voice data is transported via internet to the T-Mobile network, that then uses its normal cellular network to transport it to the final destination (the person that you are calling). Not only UMA gets you a very good connection, it can also let you call for free: for an additional $9.99/mo T-Mobile lets you call as much as you want via UMA (that’s T-Mobile Hotspot@home). If you don’t pay $9.99 UMA still works, but the minutes are taken from your monthly pool. The best of all is that UMA works from outside the USA as well. As long as you can connect via UMA anywhere in the world, T-Mobile bills you as if you were in the U.S , and that means no roaming charges or international pricing (that’s was true for me at the time of writing, but remember that T-Mobile USA can change this policy in the future).
UMA is truly awesome. Other carriers sometime have their own version of WiFi calling, but it’s clumsy and requires a special router, which means that you can’t do it from someone else’s house, or a public hotspot. It’s funny, because T-Mobile has adopted UMA to compensate for their inferior network coverage. Now, it turns out to be their most formidable feature (in my view), but yet, one that very few consumers know about. T-Mobile did an increadibly poor job of communicating it.
Quality of camera photo of the Bold 9700 is quite good, and we have no problem recommending this phone for its camera. The details are crisp and it does well most of the time. I spotted some blurriness in the upper-left corner, but we don’t know if it’s just our device or if they are all that way. We’ll let you check our full-size images on Flickr to judge if that’s good enough for you. When using the flash, we found it to be too hard at close proximity, but at 3 or 4 feet, it’s actually not bad at all.
The Blackberry 9700 is the best Blackberry out there. We have a preference for the T-Mobile version because it has UMA support (Hotspot@Home) and that’s simply awesome, especially for the international traveler (big roaming charges savings!). I suggest you to use the 9700 as the main phone for a simple reason: You need it to work efficiently. Not only the physical keyboard works very well, but the email app is also excellent, especially when you know the shortcuts. The 9700 also takes good pictures, and that can be important as we all tend to upload and share photos in quasi real-time.
That said, virtually any other recently launched smartphone has better web browsing, better mapping and a better "app" experience in general. The relatively slow application performance on the 9700 can be found pretty much across the board.
At the moment, the 9700 and Blackberry device in general retain enough added-value to do well, their recent quarter just proved it. However, my guess is that the two-phone weilding crowd (usually iPhone+BB) won’t tolerate paying a second subscription forever.
ractically unlimited
