Great smartphone - looks great too (Blackberry Bold 9000)

Member Name: emmajt81

Product:	Blackberry Bold 9000
Date:	13/08/09 (83 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, emails come through quickly, keyboard is good

Disadvantages: Battery life not great, can go slowly if you've used too much phone memory

The Bold is my first Blackberry and it is now something I don't think I could do without in my life! The Bold is sleek looking and a great fashion accessory as well as being such a good smart phone to have. It's robust, reliable, pretty, small, easy to type on, easy to set up and easy to sync up to Outlook.

Apps

I'm not really one for gadgets or gizmos but prefer simple phones. I like to call and like to text and that's about it. And I can do all that with the Bold. But I also like with this I can have the RIM Facebook application which send all my notifications straight to my phone - great for when I'm out and about. The Blackberry App World is somewhat of a revelation and you can download apps from here quickly and fairly cheaply - some of them are event free like Facebook and MSN Messenger. If you have an unlimited internet package it's great. The Bold also comes with a Word, Excel and Powerpoint type applications which is great if you're a business user and need to view important attachments or documents on the go. Blackberry Messenger is also a cheap way to stay in touch with others who have Blackberrys. By giving them your pin (or them giving you theirs) you can add one another and chat on what is like MSN messenger. If you have an unlimited internet tariff again this is free - so saves money on texting. Something else to get addicted to!

Features

I thought the Qwerty keyboard would annoy me but now I don't know how I ever used a normal mobile phone keypad! Its a large clear keypad which is easy to type on. There is a clear distinction between the buttons. The Homescreen buttons are easily changable and you can move all your icons around as you please. The Calulator and Clock features are pretty standard. The syncing function with the Blackberry computer application is surprisingly easy - even a novice could manage it. It's great to be able to sync my entire Outlook calendar and address book with the Bold and get reminders pop up exactly as if I was on the laptop. The internet browser is fairly quick to use, and the Bold has WIFI capabilities so it's always good to connect to a WIFI connection if you can - especially when out or abroad - much cheaper and faster to load pages.

Email

My Bold uses BIS which is the simplest and cheapest solution for email. You can have more than one account but it will only sync up you Inbox and Sent Items - your address has to be done via a manual sync with a wire. If you want it all done automatically you have to opt for the BES option which means you need your own server - good if you're with a huge organistion for business but opt for the BIS option if you own a small business or are a personal consumer. BES can be expensive. My tariff for example is £35 a month, 700 minutes, 250 texts, unlimited internet, BIS email, unlimited landline calls and Vodafone Passport (for overseas calls). All in all a good deal. And the Bold was free. Vodafone in my opinion offer the best deals for the Blackberry when you consider the data usage. Emails come in quickly and reliably on the Bold - have had no problems with them.

Downsides

A couple of downsides to the Bold - the vibrate function - pretty much non existent. The phone won't ring and vibrate at the same time, it rings, then vibrates in succession which isn't very good! I hope a future OS update will fix this. Also the Bold doesn't ring for very long when you receive calls - maybe 3 rings? You have to call your network operator for a code to enter if you want it to ring for say 30 seconds. Surely this would be an easy thing to implement into the Bold's setting menu? The built in Maps application isn't very good either - very slow - so I would advise downloading Google Maps which is much better and much faster. The camera isn't great on the Bold either - only 2MP. I think they could have at least upped this to 5MP - the standard of this phone deserves a quality camera. It does have a flash granted, but night-time pictures don't look great on the Bold. A shame considering the amount of storage space the memory card that comes with it has.

The menus are nice to look at but some features are hidden away and will take a bit of finding (like changing the ringtone, seeing what memory you have left, etc). They should take some tips from Nokia whose menus are very well organised indeed.

Battery time

You will probably need to charge the Bold every day if you are making calls, texting, emailing and surfing the net every day. If you leave the phone and barely do anything with it you may get 2 full days of battery use out of it.

All in all, a great phone. My first Blackberry and I am now an addict and looking forward to future releases.

Summary: A great smart phone and now a fully fledged addict to Blackberry!

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Installation:
Noise:
Battery life: