BlackBerry Bold 9780 Review

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Take the recently reviewed BlackBerry Style, convert it to a candybar style body by axing the clamshell with front LCD screen, and you have the BlackBerry Bold 9780. Just like the BlackBerry Style, the Bold 9780 sports the latest BlackBerry 6 OS, 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, and full QWERTY keyboard. BlackBerry 6 has brought many improvements to RIM's latest lineup of handsets, and the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is no different from the latest crop of speed demons.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 - Design & Build:

The BlackBerry Bold 9780 sports all the design flaws that we found with the 9700, like the tacky faux-leather back, the 3.5mm audio port on the side of the phone rather than the top, and the side key that’s too hard to trigger.

On the plus side, it also means a sturdy build – the Bold line can take a seriously clattering, unlike many massive glass touchscreen smartphones – an optical trackpad that never fails, and a sharp 480×360 resolution screen that’s vastly more visible than any high end touchscreen phone outdoors.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 - OS: BlackBerry 6

The big change with the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is that it comes with BlackBerry 6 installed out of the box, while that promised update for the Bold 9700, Pearl and Curve 3G is nowhere to be seen. As on the touchscreen BlackBerry Torch 9800, it comes with some great, innovative features, but they do feel like diamonds in the rough.

To the strong points: as on the Torch, universal search is astonishingly convenient. While typing a name or number on any BlackBerry is the speediest way to call someone, now you can also rifle through your media, email headers, apps, YouTube and Google straight from the same screen. It’s excellent, and puts everything rivals have come up with so far, save for Palm and its webOS Just Type feature, to shame.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 - Browser:

The Social Feeds app too is a delightful way to see all your Facebook, Twitter and IM babble on one screen, and updates for each drop seamlessly in in the background with no apparent dint on battery life. Then of course there’s the browser, which makes amends for years of abuse suffered on the part of BlackBerry addicts by not being awful. It’s WebKit powered, like its modern rivals, and opens pages quicker, and simultaneously – yes, honest to goodness tabbed browsing on a BlackBerry. There’s even kinetic scrolling for quickly rolling down a page. We did notice it’s ever so slightly slower to start up in the first place, but these improvements more than make up for it.


BlackBerry Bold 9780 - Network:

Call quality wasn’t audibly different from the Bold 9700, which is to say it’s still respectable, and in a quiet room, you can comfortably stick yourself on speaker phone for calls. Battery life doesn’t appear to have changed, so you can get through whole day with 3G, WiFi, GPS and all guns blazing.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 - Processor & Memory:

The processor inside the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is still clocked at 624MHz, but memory has been upped to a plentiful 512MB of RAM, so you’ll definitely be seeing that cursed whirring clock less. While it’s hard to know where to attribute the improved performance over the 9700, since it runs an older operating system and has less memory at 256MB, it’s definitely speedier when running with multiple apps, and we never had to perform a battery pull and lengthy restart due to the OS stalling. We’ll be interested to see how performance on the Bold 9700, Pearl and Curve 3G changes when their respective updates roll out.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 - Camera & Video:

The BlackBerry Bold 9780 has a five megapixel camera with a flash, an improvement on paper on the 3.2MP sensor RIM has been shoving in just about everything over the last two years. It’s certainly faster – you can go from homescreen to picture snapped in under three seconds – and the thumbnail of your last shot that takes you to the camera roll is helpful. We can’t say it’s a huge improvement visually however, and the VGA video recording is still mediocre, as you can see in the clips below compared against the Bold 9700′s 480×360 filming. On the plus side, you can now upload to YouTube straight from BlackBerry 6, and it’s very quick.

Conclusion:

The BlackBerry Bold 9780's key new feature is OS 6, as many of its physical and technological specifications are unchanged from its the 9700 model. The ergonomics are mostly fine, but we'd have preferred to see a faster processor in addition to the internal memory boost. OS 6 is a real step forward, though, and nobody does a mini-keyboard as well as RIM, so the BlackBerry Bold 9780 should be a winner for mobile email fans.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 Specs & Price >