Using the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is a bit like driving that little old three door Ford you’ve had for years – and just had it back out of the garage. There’s a new clutch, but you know deep down that the engine under the bonnet is aging and inefficient. But damn, if it doesn’t get you nipping around town at speed sometimes.
Is this slight upgrade worth it for your next upgrade? Read on and find out in our our full BlackBerry Bold 9780 review.
Let’s start by stressing that we love the BlackBerry Bold 9700. Really love it. We’ve probably used one more than any other phone for the last year, simply because its keyboard is so good. Of course, we know that compared to the iPhone and latest Android – and even Palm – devices, it’s under powered and crippled by a creaky operating system. So can an upgrade to BlackBerry 6 and a slight tinker under the bonnet be enough even to play catch up? Let’s find out.
Design and build
This phone looks EXACTLY like last year's model
We said last year that we felt that the Bold 9700 was the pinnacle of the QWERTY form factor, but that wasn’t us giving RIM permission to crank out the exact same design again 12 months later. Here we are though, and in almost every respect, nothing has changed, bar a dark black rim instead of the 9700′s chrome lining.
That means 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.
This is the best mobile keyboard ever made. End of.
It also means the BlackBerry Bold 9780 keeps the legendary keyboard intact. RIM hasn’t changed even an atom in it, and this really is fine by us. We’ve tried many, many other phones with all sorts of keyboards, and every type of onscreen QWERTY keyboard out there, and none of them have ever come close to the accurate speed you can hit on it. If you’re going to buy the BlackBerry Bold 9780, it should be for this reason and above all else.
BlackBerry 6
The big change with the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is that it comes with BlackBerry 6 (as opposed to OS 5) installed out of the box, while that promised update for the Bold 9700, Pearl and Curve 3G is nowhere to be seen (A RIM spokesperson would be no more specific than the “coming months” when we asked). As on the touchscreen BlackBerry Torch 9800, it comes with some great, innovative features, but they do feel like diamonds in the rough.
The new look BlackBerry 6
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.
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.
Tabs! Actual tabs! About time, RIM.
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.
Unfortunately, these plus points don’t make up for the fact that RIM has done little to optimise BlackBerry 6 for a non touchscreen device like the BlackBerry Bold 9780, and actually made things more confusing for users.
This list now pops up when hit hit the menu button on the homescreen. Why? There's no reason for it.
We’ll get over the lack of a Today view, showing your actual emails, calls and calendar events on your homescreen at all times – that’s triggered instead by hitting the envelope icon at the top of the screen. But we don’t understand why you now have to click the menu button twice to pull up your full list of apps and folders, rather than just once. The different trays of apps, ordered by media, downloads, frequently used and favourites, also don’t lend themselves well to a trackpad and no touchscreen combo – it’s very easy to swipe to the left or right while you’re trying to scroll down.
Check out the best BlackBerry Bold 9780 deals now
For better or worse, very little has changed at the core -this is still very much BlackBerry OS. Media format support hasn’t been improved, not that this is a huge failing of BlackBerry OS, multitasking still works conveniently by long pressing the menu button, and email support is still first in class. Why can’t everyone else let you access different accounts and a unified inbox straight from the homescreen?
Then of course there’s the apps issue. While we never had any problem opening older BlackBerry apps that we rely on on BlackBerry 6 (Google Maps works fine, which is a relief, since BlackBerry Maps is still deeply unpleasant to use), BlackBerry App World is incredibly sparsely stocked compared to the iPhone App Store and Android Market. While it’s great for getting work done, if you want to kick back and make some music, download a free satnav or run games on an emulator, you’d better look elsewhere. RIM has made headway into the consumer market in recent years with some savvy marketing, but in this respect, its claims that BlackBerry phones can be fun to use don’t ring true.
Performance and battery life
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.
Check out our Top 5 best BlackBerry apps here
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.
Camera
The camera now shoots five megapixel stills, and is quicker to boot
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.
Verdict
Not a BlackBerry fan already? Nothing to see here then
Based on our experiences with the BlackBerry Bold 9780, we’re pretty certain that current BlackBerry owners with a phone earmarked for the BlackBerry 6 update are going to love it, and if all you want is a phone for work and basic smartphone tasks (GPS, photo uploading etc), it’ll be enough to keep you happy long beyond the expiry of your contract.
But whether you should buy the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is another matter entirely. Nowhere is RIM’s design conservatism more evident than in this handset, and we’re getting quite narked off with it now.
The company can’t rely on BlackBerry Messenger and an amazing keyboard for ever, though if this is all you want, there’s no doubt that the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is the phone to go for – and it’s unquestionably the best BlackBerry available. The problem is that once again, RIM is catering to loyalists while doing nothing to get Android and iPhone fans to cross the boards, and it really would be best to do that sooner rather than later.
Here’s an idea, RIM. Make this phone again next year, but give it a touchscreen – the Palm Pixi has shown it works, and pinch to zoom controls would remedy a lot of the ills this phone has.
The BlackBerry Bold 9780 has topped our Best BlackBerry phone Top 5 list, which is why we’ve given it our Recommended rosette. Check out more Top 5s here and find out more about how they work with our Top 5 guarantee.
