RIM used its 2011 BlackBerry World even in Orlando to unveil its latest CDMA phone, the fast and powerful Bold 9930. Thin and light, the new Bold will run the new BlackBerry 7 operating system, showcasing new social features and new hardware.
The hardware specifications are impressive, with the Bold’s stainless steel frame meaning the device is only 10.5mm thick. Where the original Bold had a leatherette battery case, the latest generation sports a stylish glass weave battery cover.
Screen resolution is good, if not quite meeting the “retina display” threshold, coming in at 640x480 pixels and 287 dpi. It’s also a capacitive touch screen, coupled with a redesigned full Qwerty keyboard, making this what RIM is calling a hybrid device.
Open it up, and you’ll find a 1.2GHz ARM processor and 768 MB of RAM, along with 8GB of flash storage (which you can expand to up to 32GB using microSD cards). There’s a high-capacity replaceable battery, and the Bold has charging points at the bottom of the device that work in RIM’s “pod” charger.
RIM has made the 9930 a world phone, mixing CDMA for the US with GSM for the rest of the world – with a long list of supported frequencies and technologies: dual-band CDMA/EV-DO Rev A, dual-band HSPA+, and quad-band GSM/EDGE. There’s also dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz 802.11 b/g/n and 5 GHz 802.11 a/n) for hotspot connections and Bluetooth 2.1 for peripherals.
Video is increasingly important, and RIM has improved the Bold’s camera using a new 5-megapixel sensor with image stabilization that supports 720p HD video recording. Like many other modern high-end smartphones the Bold plenty of other sensors, including a compass, an accelerometer and GPS. That means that RIM is finally giving the Bold the features it needs to support augmented reality, and a version of the Wikitude AR augmented reality browser is bundled with the device.
You’ll be able to use the Bold 9930 with NFC technologies, tapping your device on a NFC tag to get a link that’ll open in the Bold’s browser. More complex applications are possible, using the BlackBerry 7 NFC developer APIs.
Hands on, the device meets the promise of its specifications. It’s both light and fast, and very comfortable. We found it easy to work with both the keyboard and the very responsive touch screen (which was also good for watching videos, with deep blacks and punchy colors).
A lot of that responsiveness is due to the new Liquid Graphics GPU-accelerated user interface, giving you smooth animations and fast transitions at up to 60 frames per second. That meant there was no waiting for documents to appear on screen, or jerkiness when scrolling through documents. We were able to zoom in and out of a PDF document and an Excel spreadsheet using familiar gestures.
The new BlackBerry 7 OS is an upgrade of BlackBerry 6 (at one point it was planned to be BlackBerry 6.1), and adds a new version of the BlackBerry browser with a new, faster, JavaScript engine – which RIM has benchmarked as faster than Apple’s iPhone 4 and Google’s Nexus S using the popular SunSpider test suite. Taking it for a spin, we found it a good, fast, browser, which worked well with the full desktop versions of web pages.
RIM has improved its standards support in BlackBerry 7, adding support for HTML 5 canvas and video, as well as newer web technologies like websockets and webworkers. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Flash, though, as we’ve been told that RIM is leaving it for QNX and the PlayBook.
BlackBerry 7 feels very familiar, especially if you’ve used BlackBerry 6 on the Torch. It’s got brighter, more colorful icons, and you’re now able to customize the panes of the front screen.
Its Universal Search has had a big upgrade, with support for voice recognition and deep links into the content of applications you’ve installed on your phone. It works well, coping with busy, loud conference rooms. Perhaps the biggest change is support for the new BlackBerry ID, which gives you a single place to sign-on for to BBM, Twitter and Facebook.
Existing BlackBerry applications should run well on the Bold, though some may have problems with the new higher resolution screen. RIM will including some new applications with BlackBerry 7 and the Bold 9930, among them a new version of its official Facebook application (adding support for Facebook chat). If you need to work with files on the go, there’ll also be the premium version of Docs To Go.
First look verdict
The combination of BlackBerry 7 and new hardware in the BlackBerry Bold 9930 gives RIM a new flagship device. It’s 9930 is fast, powerful and light, with good looks that should turn heads.
We found we liked its hybrid keyboard/touch user interface, and the new OS’s Liquid Graphics uses the built-in GPU to the full. Hardware will be available later in the summer, when RIM will announce its carrier partners.
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