It’s been a while since I last played with a completely new phone platform, so I was semi-looking forward to getting a Blackberry Bold (9000) as my new work phone. As before, as the device has been reviewed by a zillion other sites already, I’ll focus on providing some personal experiences based on a couple of weeks of usage:
- The feel of the phone is very good; it’s quite heavy, but feels very solid and the build quality is top notch.
- The screen is gorgeous. I really like it. It could use a portrait feature or could generally be longer in the y-dimension, but it’s very nice.
- The browser is, unfortunately, not very good. So I tried the Opera Mini browser, but it turned out that sucked even more. So I’m back to the Blackberry browser which seems to display most mobile-optimized sites decently. The usability is just not very good.
- Strangely, getting email to work was a very painful experience. Not only that, but I think the email experience overall isn’t very good. There are several problems with it:
* All emails from multiple sources end up going to the same inbox; I can have my GMail mails in their own place, but they also end up showing with my work mail scattered therein. That’s really confusing. Additionally, the GMail client just plain and simple refuses to work.
* When you delete or move a mail on your mail account, it doesn’t get deleted or moved on the phone. Hence mail just piles up on the phone.
* When you delete a GMail mail on the phone, it gets deleted (i.e. not archived) on the GMail account; there is no “archive” option
* There is no “Mark all as read”-option. - I could get used to a full keyboard on the phone. Once you learn to type on the tiny keys, it’s very convenient. Makes me think the next phone I buy for myself needs to have a keyboard.
- I’m not particularly impressed by the battery life; for some reason I thought Blackberry would be a little bit better in terms of battery life than other smartphones, but no. You need to recharge every day and what’s worse, charging the battery is darn slow.
- The user interface looks pretty enough – though thoroughly unoriginal – on the first level. But click on almost anything and you get a hideous MS DOS-like text-only interface that should really be taken out and shot. Settings etc are far from intuitive or usable and there are too many of them.
- There are several other usability issues also; for example the idle screen shows the number of missed emails and any overdue calendar notices in a small icon on top of the screen. However, one cannot click on these to get to the emails or calendar – instead you have to go through the normal menu structure or deal with the pop-ups.
All in all I suppose it’s a decent phone for business use, but I would certainly not buy one myself.
