The -Bold-ness of the 9900

Let me start out by saying this is the best Blackberry I have ever used, as well as quite possibly, the best looking phone Blackberry has ever released. How it stacks up against other phones will be discussed in this article.

To start, we'll take a look at:

Size and Aesthetics

The Bold 9900, is much wider than most phones in the market right now at 2.60 inches. To compare it with other phones in the same price bracket, iPhone 4 is 2.31 inches., and the HTC Desire HD at 2.43 inches, the phone is quite larger, and will definitely be akward in a person with small hands.
What blackberry does well, is it uses the phone size efficiently, the QWERTY keyboard maximizes the real estate of the bottom half of the phone, and is edge to edge. The screen size takes the top half of the phone, and is a measly 2.8 inch, but for the purpose of navigating the updated OS.7, it functions as it should, and displaying the quality of the webpage/pictures quite clearly, we will touch back on the screen in more detail later. And all this is surrounded by a metal trim, and accentuates Blackberry's vision to keep the Bold as their flagship premier phone.

Pictures taken by the Nexus S, and edited on iPad 2

Battery Life on Everyday Usage

Before I can start on giving a good estimation of the battery life, and how this phone handles on a day-2-day basis, I have to give you a good idea of what I use my phone for, of course this will differ between people, and your battery life will coincide with your usage.

I work on a rotation basis, so some days I need to work at 6am, and other times I work at 2pm, I also do a large amount of BBM, and Email transfer on a normal day, average only a few minutes of calls, and a very low amount of Texts, and more than average web surfing, I do not use Facebook, or Twitter, and WiFi remains -ON-, regardless if i have a WiFi connection or not. To that extent I get over 24 hours on a full charge, and by the time I start my shift the next day, I usually sit at 30% full capacity. Which in my opinion, is great, but how does it stack up to our competition? Compared to the iPhone, my average battery life on that is 14 hours, doing less texting, and slightly more playing games, but not to an extent that will affect the battery too much. The HTC Desire HD is even worse at roughly 10-12 hours, barely getting through my day with the same usage as the iPhone. Though when you compare this with the older blackberry, you are getting almost a whole day and a half, and because of that I would have to say the battery is above average, and should be good for all you heavy texter out there to last from dawn to dusk... but only barely.

Battery

Apps and Software

By far, the worse part about any Blackberry, made even worse *if thats even possible* by the OS.7, since OS.7 ecosystem is not compatible with the vast majority of the older application, what does that mean in laments term? Well blackberry has around 10,000 applications total, and that is for all their OS combined, so for OS.7, you can bet that you may have access to only 4-5,000 applications due to compatibility issue. Developers will need to catch on with the new OS, and rewrite some of the code to make it run on the new OS.

"iPhone only had a few thousand in the first year, Blackberry might catch up like them!" Yes and No, iPhone did only have a few thousand, but they also only had 1 general OS (with very small updates in between each iteration), so for a developer, they can create an application, and have it span most of the current iPhone user from the original 3g to the iPhone 4. Blackberry on the other hand require their developers to make updates or create new applications all together to have it run on their newer phone.

So will blackberry AppWorld take off like the Apple Store? Probably not, but it should be substantial enough to give most user a fair amount of games, as well as useful apps, and to top it up, Blackberry is definitely now making a push towards improving the AppWorld ecosystem by developing a host of application like Blackberry Music, and cleaning up their AppWorld interface, to compete with the likes of Apple or Android,  it is still steadily growing, but don't get your hopes up for Angry Birds for your Blackberry Handheld.

Screen & Touch Interface

Only thing I can say about this is "it just works" the screen is 2.8 inches, with a pixel density of 228ppi, what that means is for a screen size this small with a pixel density that big, you are getting a very crisp clean image. the touch sensitivity on this phone is superb, though I did find the pinch and zoom function in the browser is quite rough, this is due to the fact that your fingers are covering up the majority of the screen, also because of the screen real estate, the browser and all the text you read  are compressed into the small screen which in turn makes viewing the text extremely hard. Watching movies and navigating the Blackbery is quite simple and clean, all your inputs are right on, with the exception sometimes in the browser, in turn you can use the trackpad to select options when you need that extra precision.

Pro's and Con's

Everyone has a reason why they love a phone, and improvements they wish will be implemented in the next iteration of phones. Blackberry users has been on the for-front of this, and has usually suffered the most, from the sub par OS.5 and OS.6 generation, there is finally a sigh of relief, Blackberry did more right than wrong on this new lineup. Competitive processor, more ram, quicker response, better camera, and yet still retain what all blackberry users love - the keyboard!

Edge to Edge Keyboard

Blackberry has finally decided to listen to the users and put a processor that is greater than 800mhz into their phones, and now pack enough juice to power BBM, Text, Emails, all without a slight hiccup. Yes there is still abit of latency when trying to load up web pages, and even when downloading apps, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

With the Bold 9900, Blackberry included one of the largest QWERTY keyboard they have ever put onto any of their phone lines, a whopping 45% larger keyboard than the Bold 9700. and with the right amount of click-y-ness (is that even a word?). In all honesty, once you used this keypad, you can say "once you go Black..Berry, you never go back!"

But not all phones are without fault, Blackberry's main pitfall is with its own service, BIS. Not only are you relying on your carrier to be working (which it is up almost 95% of the time for most users), Blackberry servers need to be up as well, and quite frankly, it is getting more and more unreliable, once the BIS service goes down, Emails, Internet and BBM gets affected.

Verdict, & Who will like this Phone

In all honesty, like I stated above, the best blackberry I have ever used, but where it shines is in the longer than normal battery life, and the superb keyboard and messaging integration. This phone is ideal for the people that loves to Text, Email, and do their social networking on the go, and dont mind the slightly wide phone, if you are one of those people, you will fall in love with this device. If you are looking at playing games, or having a great browsing experience, I would recommend you to look at the iPhone or the Android devices, or even the Blackberry Torch 9810, or the 9860, as they all have a much larger screen real estate to allow you to get the most out of your browsing experience, and have a large amount of developer support behind the device to keep you entertained if your phone is the closest thing you can grab.

I hope you all enjoy this read, and dont forget to post comments or subscribe!

More to come