Review: Blackberry Bold

Written by Russell Johnson

Although I am a bit of a nerd, that is only on the surface. I am not one in practice. I love flashing lights and gauges (especially round retro ones) and use all sorts of gizmos from an HDTV camera to a Roomba. My relationships with their intricacies, however, are about as deep as Thomas Kincade's relationship with art.

I have had an uneven courtship with mobile phones.

I loved my old Motorola Flip Phone. It didn't pretend to be anything more than a telephone without wires. I was initially pleased with my last model, a Palm Treo 680, billed as a Smartphone, but I am sure it would struggle to match wits with a third grader. I never quite sorted out the navigation system and the keys were too dainty for my prodigious thumbs. I use a phone to take notes at meetings but my words came out as if they were written by a drunken Lewis Carroll.

Then I dropped it (my wife Pat says on purpose), the case separated and the top popped off placing the ringer in permanent vibrate, making me a walking bumble bee.

The search was on for a replacement.

So, where does middle aged guy go for advice? His kids, of course. My son is an uber-technoid who ubersees the server farm of a major e-commerce company and my daughter is a PhD candidate at CalTech. They gotta know more than a guy with a degree in, uh, Humanities, right? Number one son showed me his HTC Windows Smartphone. He launched into a demonstration of how he could boot into Linux and, I was led to believe, take charge of the universe. He showed how briskly he could surf around its touch screen and type on its quite-usable keyboard.

Number one daughter said "you gotta get an iPhone." But then, she is an Apple person (I wish someone would do a study on the relationship between Hello Kitty and Apple addiction). She emailed a picture of her dog she took with it. The picture was sharp and the dog adorable. She flew through its menus and browser with magical finger motions, just as if she were going to pull a rabbit or a dove out of it. But the iPhone didn't have a keyboard. It was quite enough for me to go from the solid kerchunk of a Royal mechanical typewriter to the overly-touchy chiclets of a Selectric to the tepid clack of PC keyboard. A dead space on a piece of glass not defined by as much as dimple was not for me.

So, the HTC was my choice. I headed to a nearby AT&T store to try it one more time. I picked it up and started playing with it. It handled like a small bar of soap. I poked around the touch screen and fiddled with the keyboard, trying to get comfortable with how one worked with the other, or not. I found a slight lag between the time I touched the screen and something happened. A voice ever so quietly whispered in my head, "Wiiiindowsssss." I have read that the new Windows Mobile is very good, but that slight lag dragged up deep-seated fears from the pit of my soul, visions of blue screens and one way streets with dull-witted "Wizards" as traffic cops. Then there was the push-to-talk switch in a place on the side that was so convenient that it was almost impossible not to push, a "feature" that could not be turned off. I was beginning to have my doubts. My eyes started to scan across the other phones on display.

The Blackberry Bold winked back at me. It had a small screen but a solid, professional look. But, like the iPhone, the Blackberry is a cult device, a driver of "lifestyle" and a fashion badge. Could a yutz like me wear a Blackberry properly? Would I have to permanently strap one of those Borg-like Bluetooth earpieces to my head? Would an always-on gadget like this become my ankle bracelet, my parole officer? Was the Crackberry all it was cracked up to be?

It was slim and solid, almost caressable. The keys had a comfortable resistance, like al dente pasta and I could actually thumb almost typo-free prose fairly quickly. I didn't care that it didn't have a touchscreen. The beauty of the tiny track ball on the Blackberry is that you can navigate and select with one hand, something almost impossible to do on a touchscreen.

The screen is blazingly bright and sharp, viewable in bright sunlight, even though it is too small for serious web surfing. It has an decent 2 megapixel camera with zoom and a flash. The zoom is pointless, however, as all it does is narrows the view and decreases the resolution. And don't expect it to jumpstart your career as an espionage agent as it has virtually no closeup range. A page of purloined text would be readable but fuzzy. Movie quality is awful, even for YouTube, so don't consider this a do-it-all media device.

The Bold works well, however, as a media player. It has a real 1/8 inch headphone plug so you can attach your noise-canceling headphones without an adaptor, and its MP3 capacity is only limited by your memory chip. I put a good collection of music on an 8GB micro-SD chip, which is as big as these chips get. But give it a year and I suspect these little memory flakes will hold as much data as a higher-end iPod. Sound quality is good, even from the built in speaker, which has almost a surround sound effect.

The quality of its built in camcorder may be ghastly but playback of streaming video is beautiful, as long as you stick with AT&Ts choices or with your own stored videos. I keep demonstration videos and Connected Traveler stories on mine and they play back sharp and colorful, with high quality speakerphone audio. I wish Blackberry (an most other phones) had an Adobe Flash player, however, as so much video is now in Flash.

And Blackberry and AT&T don't offer streaming audio, unless you want to pay for it or unless you discover, as I did, a slick little $25 program called Berrytunes. Berrytunes not only plays your MP3 collection, it also offers internet radio and podcast subscriptions, a choice of hundreds of preselected ones or you can add your own. I have made my Blackberry Bold a universal audio player that I use with headphones, through the speakerphone (remember the transistor radio?) or hook it up to my stereo to play internet radio, podcasts or MP3s.

My only warning with any always-on device is to make sure that you have an unlimited data plan and that your data program is turned off while you are roaming. The default on my phone was "on." You may have an unlimited data plan in the US, but go over the border to Canada and you may, as my wife and I did, get nailed for hundreds of dollars of data charges. In other countries that could be thousands, if you walk off a plane with data services turned on. Check with your carrier BEFORE you go overseas. But the Bold also has built-in Wifi, which finds my home network and can easily be set to most hotspots, including overseas ones.

The Blackberry Bold may not be the perfect, do all device, but unlike my previous phones, I learned it in a day, it is the easiest navigating, most responsive phone I have ever used. I use it every morning to check ten email addresses and blow off any spam before it reaches my laptop and read the New York Times. I use it to listen to NPR's Morning Edition while shaving and plug it into my stereo to listen to Dinner Jazz in the evening or monitor our own Connected Traveler Radio. I catch up the Daily Show on video.

And, oh, lest I forget. It is also a damn good phone.

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