Blackberry Bold 9900 Dakota Review:
Hardware First and foremost, we would take a look at the build quality of the phone. The Blackberry Bold 9900 is made out of plastic, with a brushed aluminium band going around the entire phone.
The dimensions of the Bold are 115 x 66 x 10.5mm (thick) and weighs at 130g. The Bold certainly gave a good ergonomic feel when it is being held unlike the Apple iPhone 4 or the iPhone 4S. Inside the Bold, it houses a 1.2Ghz Qualcomm 8655 processor. Unlike 2011/2012 standards of mobile companies, Research In Motion (RIM) did not put in a dual core processor, but a single core processor. The Bold 9900 has a fixed focus 5 megapixels camera, which shoots just horrible photos. Of course the Bold has RIM’s iconic trademark, the QWERTY keyboard and this being the best keyboard that they have built so far. According to RIM, it is 6% larger than the original Bold 9000 keyboard. The screen is measured at 2.8 inches in diagonal with a resolution of 640x480, everything that is on the Blackberry Bold looks sharp and crisp, even though it has a lower ppi when compared to the iPhone 4, the screen is way better than previous generations of Blackberry. The Blackberry Bold 9900 comes with a 1230mAh, JM1 battery. It basically is a smaller battery as compared to the one found in the previous generation Bolds like the 9700 and the 9000 which has a 1500mAh battery. However even so, the battery life on the Bold has been fantastic. With heavy usage, unplugged at 7am in the morning, it lasts till 11pm at night before it needs to be charged. |
Software OS7 firstly is a big improvement over all the previous Blackberry operating system. OS7 is speedy, fluid and opens applications relatively quick. A big step from previous operating systems is that the operating system is much more colourful in comparison where the old operating systems would use to have “monochrome” like icons.
OS7 comes with RIM’s liquid graphics technology makes using the phone a much more pleasant experience in comparison to previous Blackberry OS when they were slow and took a long time to open up. Applications on the Blackberry do not crash at all, in fact, for the 3 full months I have been using this phone, there was never a time an application would need to be force closed due to unresponsiveness. However with all this being said, even though the browser has been upgraded, and made better for OS7, it still isn’t able to keep up with the rest of the competition like Android and Apple’s mobile Safari. The Blackberry App World, just isn’t RIM’s forte, even though it has been updated over the years, however with that being said, again like the browser, it isn’t as polished and as functional as an iOS device or an Android market, even though the numbers are growing in the Blackberry App world, the quality of the applications found in the App World is just horrendous. In addition to that, the prices for paid apps is just horrendous, $5 for a theme is just ridiculous. Hopefully in time, RIM would filter out the junk applications in the App World and have better quality apps. Blackberry Messenger or how many people say, BBM, is one of the reasons why someone would want to buy a Blackberry, in fact many other companies have taken cue from Blackberry and created their own instant messaging software, for an example like Apple’s iMessage, Samsung chatON and the all famous cross platform messenger, whatsapp. Unlike this services too, BBM requires the user to have a Blackberry Internet Service plan before they can use this feature. With every Blackberry, it has a unique PIN, just like how we have identities, and to add friends to our BBM, we would just need to enter our companion’s pin. Using BBM is simple and easy, it has a dedicated application, and when a message is sent, a letter “D” would appear on top of a tick beside the message telling the user that the message has been delivered. Once the other party has read the message, the letter “D” would change to the letter “R” telling the user that the other has read the message. BBM is a just a simple and fast way of communicating with friends that have a Blackberry because it is basically instant. Email on the Blackberry is AMAZING. Once an email account has been setup, emails come in fast. Once an email is being sent from the computer, within 2-3 seconds later, the phone would beep indicating that there is a new email. It is faster than the iPhone or any other phone out there in receiving and sending email. |
In Conclusion...
Who is this phone for? Basically this phone is for everyone who likes to text, who needs email to be delivered fast and sent fast.
With a 1.2Ghz processor this phone is speedy for texting, BBM, making quick notes , emails and of course people who love the traditional QWERTY keyboard over the virtual keyboards we now see on most phones.
This phone is not for people who would want to get a phone to play games, use applications and view multimedia or even to browse the web. Even though the browser is sufficient, waiting time for full web pages to load could be painfully slow.
By: Nicholas Indrawan
With a 1.2Ghz processor this phone is speedy for texting, BBM, making quick notes , emails and of course people who love the traditional QWERTY keyboard over the virtual keyboards we now see on most phones.
This phone is not for people who would want to get a phone to play games, use applications and view multimedia or even to browse the web. Even though the browser is sufficient, waiting time for full web pages to load could be painfully slow.
By: Nicholas Indrawan