BlackBerry Bold 9900 review: First Look

RIM's latest smartphone might be headed for an identity crisis. Its parent wants the Bold 9900 to look and feel like the classic BlackBerry Bold, only better. It also wants the device to have the same luxury feel as, say, the iPhone, with sculpted keys and glass and brushed aluminium in the thinner, lighter case.

To the untrained eye, it still looks and feels like a Bold of old, with important characteristics such as a removable battery. Today's model now certainly feels like a sleek and premium device.

Familiar but sleeker, the BlackBerry Bold 9900 is less of the same (thinner and lighter) as well as more (faster and with better browsing).

Despite running the beta version of the new BlackBerry 7 OS the user experience is fast, fluid and, for the most part, responsive, whether you're touching the 2.8in VGA capacitive screen or giving the keyboard a workout.

BlackBerry 7 OS looks much like the previous version, but with more colourful icons. You also get the option of turning off any of the panes on the home screen that automatically organise icons. That way, if you don’t use the favourites pane you can switch it off.

Despite running the beta version of the new BlackBerry 7 OS the user experience is fast, fluid and, for the most part, responsive.

However, you can’t create extra panes yourself, so the main way to organise apps is still by creating folders and moving icons around by hand. As your app collection grows things become less manageable.

You can turn off any of the sliding panes on the homescreen in BlackBerry 7 OS.

Existing BlackBerry apps will all work, but if they’re specifically designed for different screen resolutions they will look odd until they’re updated. The universal search is in the same place in the user interface but now works with voice as well as searches you type in. Unfortunately, the room we tested the Bold 9900 in was noisy so it didn’t work perfectly every time. If you’re somewhere quieter you should be able to search without typing fairly successfully though.

It's a shame that BlackBerry 7 OS won't be available as an upgrade for older handsets because it relies so much on GPU hardware acceleration and the 1.2GHz processor in the Bold 9900. But that's the price you sometimes pay for progress.

The new Bold has a proximity sensor, magnetometer compass and a gyroscope. There's also GPS, which will enable augmented reality apps to come to life. Indeed, the Bold 9900 will come with a version of Wikitude that will identify both places and people from your address book on screen).

The device's NFC capability may prove the real draw for many users. So far we’ve only seen demos of tapping the BlackBerry onto a tag to see content on screen but this will also be integrated with the BlackBerry payments platform. And that’s going to work with the single sign-on based on BlackBerry ID too. In addition to opening up access to BlackBerry App World, BlackBerry ID lets you sign in once to BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook and Twitter and should make switching from one BlackBerry to another easier. Initially though, it’s just for consumer apps.

The five megapixel camera promises image stabilisation, which should come in handy for the 720p video recording mode. And the audio recording is as excellent as it is on the Pearl 3G.

The device's NFC capability may prove the real draw for many users.