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RIM has updated its flagship model with a sleeker and more powerful model – the Bold 2 9700. Featuring an improved processor and latest UI, the phone certainly has the specs but can it stop the iPhone and Android onslaught? The BlackBerry Bold was one of the standout devices of last year – it was RIM’s statement that it was coming for the consumer market.

And while it was successful, there always comes a time for a refresh, and that’s where the new BlackBerry Bold 2 9700 comes in.

It’s a sleeker, faster and more able device than its predecessor, and it shows. We’re talking 16g lighter, 6mm less wide, 5mm less tall and a whopping 0.9mm thinner. But what this means is a more cramped keyboard, which will be a big worry for some who picked up the Bold, not because it was one of the first BlackBerrys to use 3G, but because it had one of the largest keyboards in the range.

The user interface is largely unchanged, though BlackBerry OS 5.0 brings some slight refinements. For example, the calendar has an easier to use system for creating new appointments with drop-down lists, and you can set your alarm clock using a spinning wheel. The home screen and main menu will be familiar to previous owners, though; you can customize the home screen with different themes and background images as well as six different shortcuts.

Below the display, you get the standard BlackBerry controls: Talk and End keys, a menu shortcut, and a back button. However, like the BlackBerry Curve 8520, the Bold 9700 replaces the traditional trackball navigator with an optical trackpad.

The move from trackball to trackpad is surprisingly easy, and we were impressed by its responsiveness (you can also adjust its sensitivity to your liking through the Options menu). Scrolling through lists and navigating menus feels smoother using the trackpad and you can select an item simply by pressing down. RIM plans to use the trackpad in all its future devices, and that’s fine by us.

Like we mentioned earlier, the transition from one to the other felt easy and natural; plus, perhaps this will eliminate the issue that some users have had where the trackball stops working for whatever reason and needs to be replaced.  Just below is the Bold 9700’s 35-key full QWERTY keyboard. Though not as spacious as the original Bold’s, the large and comfortable buttons are ideal for typing both short text messages and longer e-mails. The individual keys have raised ridges so they’re easier to use compared to completely flat buttons, and they provide a nice springy feedback. If anything, they were just a touch stiff to press, but overall, we’re very happy with the keyboard.

On the left spine, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microUSB port/power connector, and a customizable shortcut key. You get a second convenience key on the right side, which is designated to the camera by default, and a volume rocker. The top holds a mute and lock buttons, and the camera and flash are located on back.

Our review unit from RIM included an AC adapter, a USB cable, a 2GB microSD card, a wired stereo headset, and a belt holster in the box. However, T-Mobile’s final sales package may vary. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.  

Calling
Call quality on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 was pretty good. We got to test a T-Mobile version of the device, which uses not only T-Mobile’s 3G HSDPA network but also UMA calling. So, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 can place calls over Wi-Fi or the regular cell network. That’s especially convenient if cell service is questionable in your home, or if the cellular network should happen to go down, as T-Mobile’s network did earlier this month. When the cellular and data network went down, T-Mobile’s UMA phones were still able to complete their calls. Battery life on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 was fantastic, as we’d expect from RIM’s BlackBerry phones. It wasn’t quite as good as Sprint’s Tour, but we also kept Wi-Fi turned on for UMA calling, while Sprint’s phone doesn’t have Wi-Fi capabilities. Even with Wi-Fi turned on, we got almost 6.5 hours of talking time in a single call, which is even better than RIM’s estimates. Signal strength on the T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9700 was okay, usually hovering around 3-4 bars of service. To synchronize your address book, the BlackBerry Bold can draw from your BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or if you don’t have an Enterprise Server account, the phone can also sync your address book with Google or even Facebook, among other popular online e-mail services. We especially like Facebook sync, which pulls contact info from Facebook and matches your existing contacts to your Facebook friends. For calling features, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 packs all of our favorites. There’s speaker-independent voice dialing, which gets its own dedicated button on the side of the phone. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 does a fine job with conference calling, though like most features on the BlackBerry, you’ll have to do some menu digging to accomplish the feat. Finally, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 gets visual voicemail support on both AT&T and T-Mobile. We love visual voicemail, and we can’t see a future when all smartphones don’t let you pick and choose which messages you hear easily from a dedicated app.

Multimedia
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is a surprisingly good multimedia device. RIM has quietly crept up and beefed up the phone’s music video capabilities, even though the media players and desktop sync software are both still a pain to use. The new BlackBerry Desktop Manager on our Macintosh was able to read our iTunes library and even sync playlists, but it took almost an hour to transfer less than 2GB of media, and the software crashed when it unexpectedly reached full capacity on our memory card. Still, we were happy to find that 2GB card pre-installed in our Bold 9700, under the batter cover but at a clever angle so you don’t have to power down to swap cards. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 also uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack so we could listen on our own earbuds, though we wish the jack was on the top or bottom of the phone so our plug didn’t jut out sideways in our pocket. The video player is the hidden gem on the BlackBerry Bold 9700, thanks entirely to that dazzling yet underused screen. The player had trouble with some of our higher bitrate H.264 video files, but most of our favorites played just fine. Actually, they looked fantastic on the Bold’s screen. A short preview for Pixar’s “Up” came alive in ways we’d never seen. The 2.5-inch display might be small for serious, long term viewing, but when a video comes your way, you’ll love watching it on the Bold 9700’s display. That display also comes in handy for showing off photos. We didn’t love the BlackBerry Bold 9700’s built-in camera (more on that later), but when our photos were good, the Bold’s screen made them look even better. Pictures weren’t difficult to manage, if you don’t mind digging through menus a bit, and we were able to send pics from the photo gallery and transfer them via Bluetooth. Also, the Bold 9700 shows up as a mass storage device, so it’s easy to retrieve a large batch of images.

Traveling
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 comes with navigation software from TeleNav for turn-by-turn directions. Unfortunately, our review unit didn’t come with the navigation app preloaded, but we were able to test the phone’s GPS signal using the included BlackBerry Maps software. BlackBerry Maps integrates nicely with your address book, but it looks awful and can’t handle serious navigation tasks. If you’ll be using the BlackBerry Bold 9700 to take a long trip, we’d spring for a TeleNav subscription instead, as our experience with the software on other BlackBerry devices has been positive, and TeleNav does a good job with directions as well as point-of-interest searches. Besides navigation, there weren’t any other useful travel apps on the phone, Even the simple calculator can only handle conversions from Imperial to Metric units, and no other convenient currency conversions. There are plenty of interesting options to pick through in the BlackBerry App World, including some location-based search software, translation and travel planning software and plenty other, so if you’re willing to do some research, there are options available, just not pre-loaded onto the device. We did enjoy the subway maps for major cities like London and New York, but none of this takes the place of a strong, dedicated navigation app.

Fun
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is not an especially fun device, if your idea of fun stretches beyond Facebook stalking and messaging. If you like surfing the Web, the BlackBerry is sure to disappoint. Many Web pages will only display their mobile version on the Bold 9700, even though the browser can identify itself as a desktop client. Our own homepage came through looking okay, but text was blocky and difficult to read at a wide zoom, and layout was somewhat jumbled. The phone also doesn’t support flash, and a search of the App World turned up no YouTube client, which is a letdown when you have to get your “History of Dance” on. There are plenty of mobile games in the App World, but none of these come close to the level of gaming you’ll find on an Apple iPhone, or even a more basic Google Android device. The camera on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 wasn’t bad for a mobile camera. It didn’t produce images that we would want to print on real paper, but for Web use our pics looked pretty good. Noise was a problem, especially in low light, and bright lights swamped our pictures with a harsh blue glare, especially outdoors. But the auto focus lens, with a 2-stage button to help us lock in the focus before we took the shot, captured some decent looking images, perfect for Facebook and definitely good enough for impressive picture messaging. When you’re out at night, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 uses a bright LED flash. Images with the flash held their color, but looked much more blurry, and the flash’s harsh light didn’t help our mug shots. Check out our image samples below.

Key features:

• 2.44″ 65K-color TFT landscape display with a resolution of 480 x 360 pixels
• Comfortable four-row full QWERTY keyboard
• Quad-band GSM support and tri-band 3G with HSDPA
• Wi-Fi and built-in GPS and BlackBerry maps preloaded
• 3.15 autofocus megapixel camera, LED flash
• 624 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM
• BlackBerry OS v5
• Responsive trackpad navigation
• Hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
• DivX and XviD video support
• Good web browser
• Office document editor
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• Decent audio quality
• Smart dialing
• Great battery life
• More compact body and lighter weight compared to the Bold 9000
• Good build quality

Main disadvantages:

• Many features are locked without a BlackBerry Internet Service account (plan)
• Mediocre camera performance and features
• No FM radio
• No video-call camera
• No TV-out functionality
• No built-in accelerometer
• No built-in compass

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