Mobile & Wireless - eWeek

Mobile & Wireless: eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: RIM BlackBerry Bold Smartphone


The BlackBerry Bold, the new smartphone available now for the AT&T network, offers an outstanding video display for a small screen and good audio quality. The Bold's revamped interface theme and the full browser failed to impress, though.
 
  • eWEEK Labs Walk-through: RIM BlackBerry Bold smartphone
    by Andrew Garcia
  • Front
    The Bold offers a QWERTY keyboard and the now-standard trackball, but the Bold has the nicest screen seen on any BlackBerry.
  • Media Player
    The Bold's Media Player takes good advantage of the Bold's hardware, delivering crisp images and vibrant sound.
  • Back
    The Bold has a textured and padded finish on the back of the device, plus a 2-megapixel still and video camera with flash.
  • Main Screen
    The main screen shows shortcuts for applications used most recently.
  • Applications
    The Bold comes with a new theme that will only show the name of the highlighted application. Since the icons can be a bit indistinct from one another, it takes awhile to get used to what is what.
  • Left Side
    The left side holds the Mini USB port, 3.5mm headset jack, MicroSD slot and a button to engage the voice dialing feature.
  • MicroSD
    The MicroSD slot claims to work with cards up to 32GB capacity, but some may find it difficult to swap cards as the flip door prevents easy grasping.
  • Right Side
    The right side of the device has physical buttons to control volume and to access the camera.
  • Connections
    The Bold is the first BlackBerry with HSDPA 3G support for GSM networks, and it also comes with Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP) and Wi-Fi.
  • 802.11a
    The Bold is the extremely rare mobile phone that works with both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands.
  • Battery
    The Bold comes with a 1,500-MAhr battery that provided more than 5 hours of talk time in my tests.
  • Page View
    The Bold has a revamped Web browser that offers a full-fledged Web browsing experience (minus Flash and Java) when in Page view, but the browser's zoom controls leave much to be desired.
  • Column View
    Users can switch to column view for a browsing experience tailored for smaller screens, but navigating the resulting long screen with the trackball can be tiring.
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