BlackBerryAsia.com

The BlackBerry Bold 9000 is the most advanced BlackBerry released and it’s the most sophisticated yet so far. The keyboard for one thing has been revised to make the keys bigger, more responsive, better defined and more tactille. The ergonomics and button size of the Bold makes thumb typing much easier.

Acrosss the top of the keyboard are buttons for picking up calls and ending calls, accessing menus, and moving backwards and exiting, plus the minitrackball for easy navigation. Wel-placed buttons on the sides of the device controls the earpiece volume and camera access.

The Bold is the first BlackBerry device to introduce both 3G and HSPDA data support. Neither is strictly necessary for email downloading, but they are important for web browsing and steps have been taken to make the Bold more web-friendly.

The camera is on the back of the Bold and, although it is only 3 megapixels, image quality is good. The Bold has been tested in several challenging situations - dark rooms, outdoors at night, taking pictures of a TV screen and it  coped with all of these situations well. The LED flash also worked well in near-pitch-black environments.

The build quality of the Bold is excellent and immediately feels more so solid and expensive than previous models. The battery cover even has a leather-like finish, make it delightful to hold. Other nice touches include a 3.5mm headphone socket, so you can use your own headphones for music playback without the need for an adapter, and a loudspeaker that does not distort at maximum volume, making the Bold perrfect for hands-free and conference calling. In addition, the microSD card slot is accessiblle from the side of the device, rather than being buried under the battery, as it is with most other mobile phones.

The 3G and HSPDA support soon shows it’s worth, as does support for a, b and g variants of Wi-Fi. Download speeds are good (although dependent on network load) and the device is quick and responsive within individual applications and when changing between them.