The new BlackBerry Bold 9900 is a beautiful piece of engineering: it feels solid, expensive even, with its metal rim round the edge and the styling is tastefully luxurious. The keyboard is as good as a physical keyboard can get. The camera, the speakers, everything impresses and feels right. The vivid, bright screen looks as good as any Smartphone on the market, and the high-resolution touchscreen display is responsive.
Within the BlackBerry family of smartphones, the Bold brand is positioned as the premium offering, representing the best of everything BlackBerry, and more than any Bold before it, the 9900 lives up to its name.
Display
The display on the BlackBerry 9900 is excellent. It’s the first higher resolution device out of RIM, featuring a 640 x 480-pixel panel. The 2.8-inch touch screen looks absolutely beautiful. It’s bright, it’s vivid, it’s crisp — this is an amazing display. Touch sensitivity and performance on the 9900 is also excellent, with touches being recognized immediately, swipes performing correctly, and flick and pinch gestures working properly in the web browser
Keyboard
The Bold 9900’s keyboard is actually 5% wider than the 9000’s keyboard, and the keystroke itself has improved. It takes very little pressure to press a key down, yet the rebound is still extremely fast. The keys make that definite click action and sound, which help you get into a great typing rhythm. If you want to experience something magical, try typing on the BlackBerry Bold 9900’s keyboard.
Operating System
All of the newly-announced BlackBerry 7 Smartphones, including the BlackBerry Bold 9900, are running the Qualcomm Scorpion MSM 8655 processor clocked at 1.2GHz on the Snapdragon chipset. the processing power is roughly double the speed of previous generation BlackBerry Bolds The BlackBerry Bold 9900 ships with 768MB of RAM and has an additional 8GB of onboard memory for media storage. Additionally, there is an expansion slot that supports up to 32GB microSD cards (whether or not a microSD card comes in the box will be carrier dependent - the Rogers unit reviewed here did not ship with a microSD card).
Battery
The faster processor and larger touchscreen display was bound to take a toll on the Bold 9900’s battery, which itself is smaller than the ones found on previous BlackBerry Bolds. With an email account being pushed to the device in the background, some text messages, Wi-Fi on and web browsing sessions, the 9900 lasted for a day and a half.
The new battery is very thin, assuming this downsize was a forced compromise in attaining the status of thinnest BlackBerry ever.
Camera / Video
The BlackBerry Bold 9900 has an always in focus 5MP, LED flash, with 4x digital zoom camera which allows for excellent image quality and it has an ultra thin footprint, which allowed us to achieve the thinnest BlackBerry smartphone to date. Finally we have HD video recording on a BlackBerry Smartphone. The Bold 9900 records video at 720p (1280 x 720 resolution) Really impressive quality.