Review of a Blackberry Bold 9700

Blackberry Bold 9700 ATT

Greetings geeks!  Today we are going to have a look-sy at the Blackberry Bold 9700.  Now I wont bore you with pictures of all the sides and corners of the device because if you Google the phone you’ll find about a thousand sites that already have.  I plan on giving you the opinion of a man who had to fork out the money to buy this phone.  We here at 8DAG believe that if you are sent a review unit then you will give a biased opinion about the device because  you subconsciously don’t expect much from a free phone, however, if you buy the phone it had better perform.  So on to the review.

I’ll cover a few of the basic areas of the phone first:

Call Quality:  On medium volume the phone is fine and for most callers even high volume works, however, if you are like me and have one friend that has no sense of volume and constantly sounds like he’s yelling you might hear a little bit of a crackly from the earpiece in the 9700.  Signal strength is fantastic; I get signal with this phone were my iPhone just said,”sorry”.

Visuals: As far as the build of the phone goes it has chrome and leather (which is more than my car has) both of which really make the phone look business minded and mean.  Also the leather insert on the battery back of the phone provides a very good non-slip surface for the phone to sit on.  As for the screen it is a dream come true.  The HVGA screen on the bold 9700 has about the same resolution as the iPhone but in a smaller package meaning that it is even sharper than the iPhone.  Videos look great and pictures come to life on the 2.44’” screen.

Camera: The camera on the 9700 has a 2x digital zoom and is 3.2 MP.  The flash adds a little bit of a blue hue to night photos but other than that it’s about what you would expect from a 3.2 MP cell phone camera.  Here are some samples:

IMG00008-20091202-0851 IMG00010-20091202-0852 IMG00012-20091202-0852

Experience: It seems that RIM has put a lot more polish on Blackberry OS 5.0, not so much visual as under the hood,  The menus open fast and ,with the new track pad ,are very easy to navigate.  As it has always been with Blackberry the phone just works (that is the highest compliment I can give a piece of hardware).

Battery Life:  This one is a biggie for me.  My iPhone would die after only about 5 hours of my heavy usage (most people get better battery life from the iPhone but I use my phone a lot more than most people).  The 9700 held up from 5AM one morning (while I listened to multiple podcasts,  checked tons of emails, got alerts from all kinds of apps, watched a few 30min TV shows, and surfed the web) to 2:30PM the next day.  RIM delivers with the 9700’s battery no questions asked (oh, and its removable, hint hint Apple)

Overall:  The Bold 9700 is the best of the traditional Blackberry line (hardware keyboards only) and takes up where the original bold left off.  If you are thinking about buying a Blackberry I suggest strongly that you take a look at the Bold 9700 because with this writer it has supplanted the Apple iPhone without a competition.  If you are a full on geek and want to get your hands on the full spec sheet for the 9700 follow this link to RIM’s site for the phone. ( http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/blackberrybold9700/bold_specifications.jsp )

Happy Geeking.  Keep your pocket protectors straight and the parts in your hair straighter.

About Jesse (The Pen of Doom)

A small time blogger with big time dreams and a love for everything geek.
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