REVIEW: Blackberry Bold 9930 In 2017 - Worth It?! By OSReviews

He folks, here OS reviews for watching our throwback review of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 2017. This phone came out in May 2011, and it was a flagship for the Canadian manufacturer at the time running on its own proprietary BlackBerry OS 7.0. This device is unique because it's one of the first classic blackberries, with this thumb keyboard to combine a capacitive, multi-touch, enabled touchscreen display, which may navigation a lot easier. If you didn't want to use the optical trackpad in the center, it was also one of the first blackberries to have a single core 1.2 gigahertz processor, a lot faster than you, older, 600 megahertz. That was found in a lot of curves back in the day. It would take a quick look at the hardware of the 9930.

First, it's unique because it's a lot wider than older BlackBerry devices. You can see they made room for a larger screen, that's touch sensitive and, as a result, they made the device a lot wider. So the keyboard is more spacious and easier to type on up to 30 percent wider. In fact, and we can compare it with some similar products at the time, including the HTC Salsa or the HTC Cha-cha and the Motorola charm, both of these devices are also keyboarded. Phones that have a full touchscreen display, with very similar dimensions, running on Android, as opposed to BlackBerry, OS 7.

So setting these things off to the side, let's take a closer look at the design. First, the phone itself offers these really nice aluminum bands running across the sides, and it makes a phone feel quite premium which it should, because it costs around $200 with a two-year service agreement. At the time we can see some bands also running through the keyboard in terms of the design, which is still an element that we see in modern BlackBerry's today. The center here features an optical trackpad, which is backlit next to talk and end keys at dubs as a power key, a back he and a standard blackberry key. That brings up the navigational drawer and options.

The side offers a camera shutter key for the fixed focus, 5 megapixels on the back with an LED flash dedicated volume rockers, which are pretty taxon, and the center here acts as a play/pause key for media controls, the top features a lock switch to lock the touchscreen when you're, not using it, and the side features a standard, 3.5 millimeter, headphone jack next to a microUSB port for charging. Finally, the back does feature is the 5x megapixel camera, and this really nice carbon fiber finish next to the soft touch rubber material on the sides, which makes the phone easier to grip and hold in the hands again what's interesting about the 9930 is despite the fact that it's a CDMA phone running on Verizon's network, it's also GSM capable. So, if I take this overseas, I can pop in a full sized SIM card behind the battery door, and it transforms into an unlocked device the standard 9900, which runs on T-Mobile's network in the States, if GSM only so, let's take a closer look at the software of the device. Next week, power this on are greeted to a pretty classic and typical BlackBerry OS experience, even though it's touch sensitive, you'll notice that most things have still been optimized with the trackpad in mind. So it's still easy to swipe using these gestures between your multiple folders and apps that are displayed in a fairly intuitive manner.

The touchscreen itself is quite responsive and even though it measures only 2.8 inches diagonally, it offers very good viewing angles as an LCD panel and has 288 pixels per inch, which is still quite comfortable for viewing text. Although, if you're watching movies, the smaller space isn't quite as ideal as more modern smartphones that we have today with that being said, the main selling point of blackberries, as always, is on productivity on messaging and texting as well as email, rather than your prototypical apps, as well as playing back games and media consumption. Even though it's handled pretty well on this phone. So we can swipe down here and take a look at this main screen. We have access to the time and date, information on the very top, including your Wi-Fi status and there's also a universal search key that I can tap on to start searching for any websites.

In addition to all my apps down below here, I also have access to the notification shade, which drags down, and I have access to. Turning on or off my network, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and there's also built in enough see on the 99 30, so you can use it for sharing information as well as some payment apps. If you want to set that up, there's also an alarm clock that you can quickly launch into, and some options, including going into more advanced settings, can be found here. There's also some profiles in terms of ringtones that I can set up very quickly, and I can swipe up a tab access to all my apps when it comes to call quality. It's no surprise that the bold 9900 performs very well.

The technology here hasn't really changed. The microphone offers noise cancellation. So if you're outdoors, it reduces the ambient sound pretty well, the Europe easier is also nice and loud. It's clean and crisp sounding and the same can be said about the speakerphone, which gets extremely loud, although it's a little on the muffled side. If you turn the volume all the way up, and it doesn't offer as much basis, I would have liked when playing back music.

However, for general call quality, it does perform quite well. Reception is nice and strong, regardless, if you're using CDMA or GSM bands, so it performs quite well as a phone which is again pretty important even with all these advanced and smart functions onboard. So if we take a look at some other apps there's not too much bloatware going on blackberry did a good job of bringing us the essentials, including the messaging features web browsing as well as access to shortcuts for versions of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which are just essentially links the browser that performed fairly well, it's optimized to run a little faster on a blackberry product, there's also access to things. Like a few limited games. You can always download more in the blackberry world, which is your App Store, which has an emitted Li limited amount of applications compared to the Google, Play Store and the iOS store, but still works.

There's also things like advanced settings and I can swipe over to look at some media content like music, slacker radio is built on here. So you can access internet radio, your images, and if we look at some wallpapers, we can have a better idea of the display. Again. It works very well very Swift and responsive again on the first blackberries to have my processor, that's faster than 1 gigahertz, which was pretty important for keeping up at the time, and you can see that even in 2017 remain Swift and have no issues as far as general navigation is concerned, so media here decent as well. It plays back your podcasts, your music, without any problems, although it's not a media centric phone just because the screen again, it's a little small.

So if we just take a look at some games on here, we have essentially the classic ones that we've seen for years and years from blackberry already, including brick, breaker and word mole, which both are pretty clever because they take advantage of either the trackpad or the keyboard. And on here you can see. The controls are also touch sensitive, so I can navigate around the pinball using just the touch screen if I wanted to, which is a lot easier to use and I can also take a look at the other game, which is word mole. That uses a keyboard, and it uses your familiarity with words. You can search them out and then type them in using the keyboard or using the trackpad and kind of navigating around to really quickly eliminate words before your time runs out, and it's again a pretty fun game to play and make sense on a blackberry phone.

But as far as really graphically intensive and super advanced games, you have to still look in the blackberry world because they're not pre-loaded speaking of memory, you can expand this via a micros card slot, also located behind the back cover. Although there is you know a few gigabytes built on end for taking images, if you want to speak of, let's take a quick look at the camera next now the camera is probably the weakest link of the bold 9900. It's just because it's a fixed focus camera still. It performs decently as long as you're, not too close to your subjects. So if we have a quick image of just some sample wires here, you can see if I have a reasonable about a foot away from the subject.

I can snap an image pretty quickly. This flash itself tends to overexpose your shots if you're too close, but it definitely helps under low-light environments. I can turn features like geotagging on and off tapping on the Menu key. You can also switch between different apps as well as change the scene modes and start recording video up to 720p. Video quality is decent, although it lacks an optical image stabilization.

So, if you're shaking your hands, it doesn't produce the sharpest video content. So if we take a look at this image, you can see. I can zoom in pretty easily but again doesn't have quite the sharpness or the detail that I really expect in a flagship smartphone, even from 2011. That should be that's just because it's fixed focus versus autofocus, but you know for landscape shots and outdoor shots. It still works pretty well.

So let's take a look at the web browsing experience. After all these things and I've loaded up the full version of the New York Times, it's a good benchmark. This is a very complex site with many flash elements, moving graphics ads as well as text and typically a less advanced processor or less agile web browsing program. It's not going to handle these tasks very well, but you can see that on the bold 9900 it loads up fairly well and everything is rendered correctly. I can pinch and zoom in and out without too many problems text will reflow.

There is some checker boarding, as you start, to do more and open up more tabs, which is typical, and you can see that this is some areas where a faster processor or a quad-core modern phone might outperform the bold 9900. But the important thing here is I work, and it's a significant update over previous curves, which really struggled with more complex sites, how to slow a processor, and he only had this trackpad to navigate without the use of you know a touchscreen. It just made things a lot more clumsy, but on here it's a pretty good experience. I can open up again multiple tabs and from here I can open up the YouTube page directly and watch videos from there, and it works fairly. Well.

So, as a quick demo of that, let's actually open up the YouTube mobile page, you can see I can either upload a video or go directly into YouTube, so works pretty well. It opens up this client that optimizes your videos by decreasing the quality and compressing the videos. So, unfortunately, you don't get full HD quality with a video content, but it does still playback reasonably quickly. This is a good test of the keyboard, which you can see again. It's very comfortable to type on keys are tactile, responsive and domed, and all in all, it's one of the best vertical keyboards that I've tested, just because how large it is, it's also backlit, and indeed, if you're doing a ton of typing or messaging, and you need a physical keyboard.

This is one of the best on the market, and that remains true again still in here 17. Let's play back a sample video clip, and you can see that it will open it up full screen, but it will buffer it in a few seconds and then play it. Scrubbing is still pretty quick, but you can see here that the image quality is only decent, there's quite a bit of a civilization just because it's not full HD, and they did this so that images the videos were playback. You know quite a bit faster, but it is at the cost of slightly decreased resolution and quality. Again.

The speaker on here does a fairly good job as well and produces loud sounds if you're playing back some music. It definitely fills up spaces quite well, but it's not the most detailed speaker and I would recommend plugging a pair of headphones or connecting to an external speaker using the wires or using Bluetooth for the best or the optimal quality. So, oh and all that's, basically a look back or throwback of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 works fairly well here in 2017. I would say that if you really need a physical keyboard blackberry, this is a decent option if you are on a budget or if you're looking for a backup phone just because it has that touchscreen display, in addition to a fantastic keyboard. Obviously, if you're downloading the most up-to-date games and apps, it's not going to run quite as well on this aging processor and aging soft floor.

But if you do want a very simple device to sometimes browse the web watch a few occasional videos as well as do a bit a messaging here and there this is definitely going to fit the bill. Battery life is also fairly good, and it lasted me about a day and a half before I needed to recharge it. Just because again, the screen is a little smaller than your average smartphone, so it doesn't draw quite as much power from the display side of things. I would say it's significantly better than you know other curves in the past, especially if you want kind of a modern smartphone or even as a gift for a child just because it also has that touchscreen option, and it also is fairly low cost. Now you can pick it up on Amazon or eBay for under 40 bucks, which I think is a pretty good value, especially since it has a decent processor, 1.2 gigahertz that can handle most of the websites that you throw at it, as well as a few occasional games and apps and again, the build quality here is just very solid, as you would expect for most BlackBerry products, so it definitely has its use is still- and you know, as long as you're not expecting the most powerful experience in the world, it should still be a serviceable keyboard smartphone for folks. Looking for a hybrid that also has a touchscreen display, you can learn more details about this in our throwback article, but for now this is in our video thanks for watching catch OS reviews.

This has been the BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone.

Source : OSReviews