REVIEW: Blackberry Bold 9780 BIS

RM1899

The Blackberry Bold 9780 has already been around for about a year now, but worth taking a second look at even as RIM is preparing to roll out a new series of Blackberrys. The 9780 is a great looking device that fits very comfortably in the palm of your hand, with a sleek black finish that gives it a slightly edgier look than most Bold models. It of course sports RIM's signature QWERTY keyboard, has a 5 MP camera, expandable up to 32GB memory, and comes with the Blackberry 6 OS.

Full disclosure- we've never used Blackberries before this occasion, and thus the device was at first somewhat frustrating. The Blackberry offers a lot of customization and a whole lot of practical functions for the working person, but the first step to accessing these functions is learning how to access them. However, once we were connected to BIS and given an unlimited Internet plan from UMobile (extremely fast 3G network, by the way), we finally understood where 'Crackberry' came from. You can't seem to put the device down, constantly hitting the net to see what emails have come in, what your friends have Facebooked or Tweeted, or just surfing the web to pass the time.

The Blackberry 6 OS is also easy on the eyes, and extremely smooth to use. Allowing you to allocate different pages to your frequently used or favorite apps is a stroke of genius, and makes it easy to access apps on the fly- don't try to access your apps while driving though, the QWERTY keyboard . The click ball on the device has been replaced with a optical trackpad that works almost the same way, but somewhat hampers your browsing as it takes some considerable scrolling to get back to the top of the page if you've just been through a session of indiscriminate stalking on Facebook, but the OS does a fine job of displaying web pages beautifully. There's also the voice control option which seems pretty solid, though you have to enunciate quite clearly to get your command through.

The red LED light that flashes on top whenever there's an update, message, or BBM is quite handy as you'll always know when something is awaiting your attention. Conversely though, the flashing light is almost accusing if you leave it alone for too long. However, it is a very intuitive device when it comes to managing your social feeds, and is hard to put down once you've started on it.The vaunted BBM service is quite the revelation to someone who hasn't used it before- an easy messaging service that's free and helps you keep in touch with groups or individuals easily, and almost instantaneous is great to have- returning to our normal phones after this will be hard.

Verdict: The Blackberry Bold 9780 is a great introduction into the Blackberry world- its intuitive and well designed, in terms of software and hardware. It may have a bit of a learning curve, but ends up being a versatile and indispensible multimedia device- the perfect starting point for anyone looking to get a Blackberry for the first time.

Rating: 4 stars