BlackBerry Bold 9000 Review

RIM built the Bold 9000 for people who read four hundred emails a day, and it shows in the two things that were best in class: the keyboard, wide and sculpted with chrome frets between the rows, which even the 9900 never matched, and the 2.6 inch 480 by 320 screen, brighter and sharper than the iPhone 3G's larger panel and the first BlackBerry display that looked like a luxury. Under it a 624 MHz Marvell chip and 128 MB of RAM made BlackBerry OS 4.6 feel instant, and the 1500 mAh battery, driving RIM's compressed push network, got two days of heavy 3G use; it was also the first BlackBerry with 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS together.

Then the parts that were not for that buyer. The 2 megapixel camera was fixed focus, with a flash that could not save it, in the same year the N95 shipped 5 megapixels with autofocus. The browser rendered pages slowly and badly, and no update fixed it: OS 5.0 in 2009 brought threaded texts and a better engine, and the Bold got it, but the phone's real support life was the year RIM took to replace it with the 9700.

The trackball collected pocket dirt until it stopped scrolling one way, which is why the successor got a touchpad. AT&T sold it from November 2008 at 299.99 dollars on a two-year contract. The camera grade is a D because the camera was a D. The overall is an A because in 2008 nothing did messaging better, and the rest of the phone was built to the same standard.