My mobile provider has upgraded my sorry-ass Blackberry 8707 to the latest and greatest offering from RIM, the Blackberry Bold. Lightning. Thunder. Reverberating voice: “iPhone killer!”
This all in the same week, that Apple in Hong Kong has started to offer iPhones sans contract on the local iStore. But I heed the warning of our trusty IT guy, Martin, who informs me that our impending upgrade to Lotus Notes will not be kind to iPhones. So the company will stick to Blackberry, thank you very much.
I have hated my old Blackberry so much. It’s like having a terminal window in your hand, where every action, even a simple action like setting an alarm, takes about seven steps.
So it’s with trepidation that I took receipt of the Bold.
Blackberry Bold
One week in, here are my impressions:
* Firstly, RIM, if you’re going to release an iPhone killer and try and appeal to Mac enthusiasts, release a proper sync client that will make it work with Mac OS X. The old Mac sync client, Pocketmac, does not support the Bold (yet, but I need my contacts today, thank you very much). So, I’ve had to shell out $39USD for Mark/Space’s Missing Sync for Blackberry. But this was money well spent. It includes preferences that will sync more than just contacts with your Bold. It shares photos and even music, straight out of iTunes. For the win!
* GPS on the Bold is pretty good, if you’re not in a building. Or in an area where you are surrounded by skyscrapers. Which is hard in Hong Kong. When I complained about this at one of the Smartone Vodafone stores in Hong Kong, the assistant told me that GPS is not that necessary as “Hong Kong has very good road markings”. Bless him. But actually, I’ve used the GPS in my car to navigate my way to an obscure location in Kowloon and it worked out pretty well. The maps are not as sexy as Google Maps, but I have a feeling Google Maps might be supported in the future.
* Multimedia: Music is crisp and clear, and the audio from the TV signal is pretty good too. TV, I hear you ask. Yes, Vodafone lets you watch a host of different channels on a select number of phones, streaming over 3G – for as long as you like. You pay monthly subs for the channels you want, and voila, you can be a couch potato without being on your couch. Camera takes good shots, although I am yet to be able to retrieve a single shot off the device. This is one dodgy area in Missing Sync’s array of sync services. It promises to pull the pics into iPhoto, but it doesn’t. I suspect this will be fixed in future.
* Email: Blackberry is the king of email. I have an iPod touch and know that typing on the touch screen can sometimes be a pain. So typing on a keypad is good, although the Bold has a narrower facia panel so the buttons are closer together compared with my old Blackberry. But it’s a matter of getting used to it, I guess.
* Wifi: The Bold supports Wifi and switches to Wifi when it enters a zone that you have pre-authorised. But one little quirk is, that since FoneTV only streams over 3G, you have to disable Wifi if you want to watch a TV channel while in reception of one of your Wifi hotspots. Silliness.
* Small details: The Bold has a few sweet design features that Apple is good at getting right. The clock that appears on the display is nicely designed and has a bedside mode that reduces brightness and takes away the second indicator.
* Display: The Bold has an HD display and fonts render beautifully. The display is really gorgeous.
So, is it an iPhone killer? It looks good, but not as good as an iPhone. In many cases it works well and better than an iPhone. But it doesn’t play as nicely with Mac as it should, yet, and this is an issue.
I for one think that, since I get iPhone apps on my iPod touch, I might put off getting an iPhone for much much later – thanks to the Bold.
It is almost as beautiful as the beautiful iPhone.
