BlackBerry Bold: the DEFINITIVE hands-on review

Design

The photos should already tell the story – this is the slickest-looking BlackBerry ever. The Bold represents an all-new ID (industrial design) that’s also earmarked for the ‘Javelin’ (the next-gen Curve, due later this year).

The Bold draws its DNA from the existing Curve and 8800 series. From the former you get, well, curves – something to soften the brick-like shape of the 8800, which dictates more the actual dimensions of the chassis as well as the style of keyboard (something we’ll go into later). The cambers of the Bold are however more elegant than those of the Curve, something you don’t notice until you put these two smartphones side by side.

The Curve has exaggerated roundings at the top and bottom, while the corners are more angled than curved. The Bold has a slightly gentler slope on the top and bottom but far more fluid curves at each corner. And while the Curve’s cross-section is in fact that of a slab (the shape is de-emphasised by the Curve’s soft black side insets) the Bold’s rear panel arcs tapers in.

The net effect of these organic flourishes is that while the Bold is larger than the Curve in almost every dimension (and a fraction heavier, at 133 grams against 110 grams), you quickly stop noticing the size differential one the Bold is parked in your paw. It sits in your hand almost like it belongs there.

(The iPhone exhibits almost the exact same traits to achieve that exact same degree of natural ‘holdability’. While I’d prefer to suggest this is a case of convergent evolution, one would be a fool to imagine that RIM’s designers didn’t study the iPhone and take away some learnings from it. Any smartphone designer who didn’t would be guilty of equal parts negligence and arrogance).

The rear panel covering the battery is rendered in a soft textured ‘leatherette’ material which enhances the Bold’s hand-friendliness. A silver-coloured plastic strip runs around the circumference of the Bold, separating the fascia from the back panel. This is a common designer’s trick to make a device with a dark or black face look smaller, and it’s also something you can see on the iPhone.

Keyboard

RIM has two styles of keyboard for its full QWERTY BlackBerrys (discounting the hybrid ‘SureType’ pattern of the Pearl). The Curve sports individual keys, while the 8800 series removes the gap between each key so they’re all nestled tight next to one another.

Most BlackBerry users cite this as a key advantage of the Curve. Yet while the Bold adopts the 8800-style keyboard, RIM has somehow finessed the design to make it far more usable. Each keypress is soft without being squishy, and a little quieter than when you’re tapping away on the Curve.

The Curve still has the edge in speed and accuracy, but the Bold closes the gap to the point where it’s almost a non-issue. Users of the 8800 series will take to the Bold like ducks to water, while Curve loyalists should need only a little time to become converts (or at least comfortable with the new layout).

The four main control buttons – Send, End, Back and to activate the BlackBerry menu – are oversized and incorporated into the fascia between the panel and keyboard, rather than being discrete buttons. This we liked. However, we found the now mandatory ‘pearl’ trackball a little less easy to use than on the Curve. The Bold’s pointing pea actually sits higher than that of the Curve, but the Curve’s is more recessed and surrounded by a concave well, which seemed to give us a little more traction on the Curve’s navball compared to that of the Bold.

Screen

Welcome to the Bold’s Killer Feature #1. Let’s try to get all the adjectives out of the way: big, sharp, rich, vivid, vibrant. The screen is all of those, and the next few lines of the Thesuarus as well. Even at relatively low brightness levels there’s still plenty of punch behind the pixels (the red LED which alerts you to new messages has also been wound up – if it was any brighter you could use it for laser eye surgery).

The 2.6 inch panel is only a smidge larger than the Curve’s 2.4in panel when measured diagonally, but the width is upsized to 2.25in against the Curve’s 1.5in, with resolution kicked up to half VGA (480 x 320) over the 320 x 240 of the Curve and 8800. Put your current BlackBerry next to the Bold and you’ll have to fight the impulse to reach for your wallet.

The Bold makes smart use of the extra screen real estate and increased resolution by revamping the UI with larger icons and a more elegant and rounded system font (you also now get a live preview of the selected font before committing to your choice).

In fact, we’d rate the Bold’s screen as superior to that of the iPhone – because while they have the same resolution, the Bold’s smaller panel makes for higher pixel density (240ppi over 165ppi, if you must know). Of course, we’d rather actually use the iPhone’s larger and more panoramic display.

User interface

The screen is complemented by the new look of the BlackBerry OS 4.6. This is two revision points ahead of the current 4.4.x generation, and has been fine-tuned for the Bold’s higher resolution (OS 4.5 brings many of the core features to existing BlackBerry devices but you’ll have to wait for your carrier to offer the OS, and we’d suggest you don’t hold your breath).

The slick UI of the Bold comes courtesy of BlackBerry OS 4.6 and its new 'Precision' visual style

4.6 introduces a new visual style named ‘Precision’, which is to the BlackBerry OS what Luna and Aero are to Windows XP and Vista, and Aqua to the Mac OS X. The default Precision Zen theme is similar to the familiar Dimension Zen theme but arrays six icons along the bottom of the screen dock-style, rather than running them along the left side of the display. The only other choice, Precision Silver, removes the colour from all icons bar the currently selected one.

But while you can set a wallpaper for the Bold’s home screen, once you dive into the full set of application icons (by clicking the BlackBerry menu button) that image is replaced by a shaded blue gradient. There’s no way to change the colour or the image itself – at least, not in the Bold’s unsullied pre-release state. We have confidence that a little work by the ‘hackberry’ community will soon remedy this...

Despite being larger and lusher, the Bold’s icons take some getting used to. They’re more stylised than the normal BlackBerry glyphs. The Bold’s icons are squares containing flat two-dimensional outlines tickled by a single daub of colour, instead of the more familiar three-dimensional full-colour icons.

All the familiar BlackBerry applications get facelifted icons,  and a few new folders are tossed into the mix

Take for example the BlackBerry icons for a GPS and alarm clock. On the Bold these are both round outlines containing a red pointer – you have to look twice, or at least expend  an ounce of grey matter, to discern the individual icon’s meaning. On the Curve, Pearl or 8800 you see two very pictographs for a compass and an alarm clock and there’s not even a microsecond of thinking into which you click. It’s small stuff, but the devil of any intuitive design is always in the tiny details.

The larger icons mean the main menu layout is reduced to a spread of three rows of icons than four (still with six columns down), so be prepared for a little more scrolling around that screen unless you park the most used icons in the first few rows and stash the rest into folders or hide them from view.

The Applications folder is where you'll find the new Documents to Go suite to view and edit Office files

The Bold actually makes good use of folders right out of the box with folders for Music, Applications (an odd assortment of preloaded programs that didn’t make in onto centre stage), Games, Downloads (where your third-party apps reside, until you move them elsewhere) and Setup (which contains the setup routines for Wi-Fi, email and Bluetooth).

The Downloads folder is the default location for all newly-installed apps (they can of course be moved elsewhere)

The Games folder is particularly worth diving into. In addition to the annoyingly addictive BrickBreaker there’s now Soduko and Solitaire, plus two games with online multiplayer modes so you to take the fight to another Bold user. These are Word Mole (a cross between Scrabble and a wordfinder puzzle) and Texas Hold ’Em Poker.

Look closely and you can see the transparency effect of dialog boxes and menus

Transparencies, that other indulgence of the modern operating system, also gets a workout in BlackBerry OS 4.6. In addition to the more noticeably see-through status ribbon and icon dock on the Bold’s home screen, menus and even dialog boxes are translucent to show some of the underlying UI. All of the BlackBerry’s standard preloaded apps get a makeover, with the calendar in particular looking much cleaner and easier to read at a glance.

Email

Here’s where the rubber really starts to hit the road. With the Bold and OS 4.6, BlackBerry takes the biggest leap ahead in the email stakes since – well, since ever. Plain old text and code-crammed email newsletters, begone: the Bold introduces HTML support in its email client (this will also appear in OS 4.5 products).

The larger screen and slimmer fonts make the Bold's inbox easy to read at a glance

It’s not 100% native HTML, mind you. What you see is more like a subset which RIM’s gateway renders into BlackBerry equivalents for the body and heading fonts, along with basic attributes (bold, italic and underlined) before the email is, as always, compressed into a tiny packet. But what you see is the adorned essence of the email, including in-line images, and that’s especially useful if you get a lot of HTML newsletters that would be unreadable on any other BlackBerry.

The text in this HTML newsletter is rendered for the Bold and fully readable, but images have not yet loaded

However, during our tests the Bold refused to download the images contained in any email messages, so we suspect this is because our Bold was still running late pre-release software. There’s also an option to disable image downloading altogether. The email client itself also benefits from the larger screen, higher resolution and sharper fonts, of course.

Documents to Go supports viewing of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF and PDF email attachments

A second part of the Bold’s winning email formula is Documents to Go, a familiar face in the world of Palm but new to the BlackBerry. Produced by DataViz and licensed by RIM for the Bold, Docs to Go enables users to read Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Microsoft Office formats.

This includes the most popular Offic