BlackBerry Bold: five more minutes to fiddle

As those of you who read my previous mini-mini-review on the Bold may remember, I was largely positive about the Bold – it is a solid progression onward from previous devices, which include the 8800 (the last BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) I owned).

Well now I am also an owner of a Bold, and am just getting used to the brushed-up UI, which I have to say looks MUCH better! The screen is also a ton brighter than it used to be on other devices, so props to BlackBerry for whoever they have supplying their LCD displays now.

Balancing out the good with the bad however (for the UI), I liken the flashy new graphics on the Bold to those on the HTC Diamond (and derivative) devices, with it’s TouchFLO – that is, the graphics are only skin-deep, and are masking what are essentially the same menus as existed before in the BlackBerry O/S (The HTC uses TouchFLO to mask the WinMo interface). I think BlackBerry have a better natural integration of interfaces than the WinMo classes of device do – nonetheless (to me anyway) it’s disappointing to find the very textual menus under the new flashy icons.

Moving on though, I like the media functions on the device – the UI again has had a thorough brush-up from previous devices. Nice iTunes sync (of non-DRM content) too.

Call quality is also excellent –for some larger devices this has been a problem in the past, due to the (sometimes) premium case materials used – which ironically impinge the radio signal – no such issues here however!

Battery life also seems to be pretty reasonable, at least once the WiFi and Bluetooth radios are turned off! For a 3G device, that is constantly keeping a network data connection (for push purposes), the battery is in fact surprisingly good. I have not used the email in anger yet, so it will be interesting to see how the battery responds then.

Overall, having had five more minutes of playtime with the device, I’m even happier with it – especially given it’s now in my ownership. Nice job BlackBerry – now let’s see if you can sort out the Storm (read my five-minute fiddle of that device here).