BlackBerry Bold 9780: Minor Updates to the 9700

Honestly, there isn’t much to talk about the Bold 9780 except for the fact that it is the first non-touchscreen BlackBerry device to come with version 6.0 of the BlackBerry OS. With Brian having done in-depth coverage of the BlackBerry Torch 9800 and OS 6.0 already, and with very few physical or software changes between the Bold 9780 and the previous Bold 9700 (since the 9700 can in fact be updated to version 6 of the BlackBerry OS), the 9780 is in essence an iterative design with more RAM (512MB) and a better camera (5MP Autofocus) from BlackBerry’s increasingly difficult to distinguish range of devices. However, there are a few interesting updates since our last look at BlackBerry OS in the Torch, so that's where we'll focus our efforts in this article.

As mentioned above, the Bold 9780 is nearly identical to the earlier Bold 9700. Even the most trained eye will find it next to impossible to identify one from the other. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing since the 9780 does look handsome in the typical BlackBerry-esque understated manner, but with there being almost a year’s gap between the release of the two and with Nokia showing that there is potential room for improvement with QWERTY-design templates in its transition from the E6x/E7x to the E5, it doesn’t really look like RIM even bothered trying. That's somewhat sad, as the Torch is a pretty handsome and well put-together device that manages to look different while still retaining the BlackBerry design DNA.

At a hardware level, the Bold 9780 and Torch 9800 use the same CPU and GPU, with the same 512MB LPDDR1 memory. The Torch also comes with 4GB integrated NAND, a 4GB microSD card, and a larger 3.2" display, giving it a slight edge in a couple areas. The Bold counters with a slightly higher capacity battery and a smaller form factor. With a few updates to OS 6 since our last look, performance differences are largely going to come from the software side rather than the hardware.

Design and Ergonomics

It’s not just the design that is of question here. I fortunately happened to have a Torch with me during the course of the Bold 9780 review and believe me when I say this, the difference in the build quality between the two is quite startling. With the Bold weighing in a very noticeable 40g less than the Torch at about 122g (4.3 oz), it feels uneasily light compared to the reassuring heft of the Torch. Adding to the notion that the build quality of the Bold isn't very confidence inspiring is the entirely glossy plastic build of the Bold that squeaks at certain points.

This is reminiscent of a lot of recent Samsung devices in that the device itself appears well-built and put together, but the weight and materials used in the construction belie the actual build quality. Oh, and the glossy plastic finish on the front and rear-top edge of the Bold is an absolute fingerprint magnet that also seems as though it will eventually be covered in micro-scratches as it shares your pocket with keys, coins and other devices (yes, my jeans have large pockets!). However, the back of the device feels better put-together, dominated by the typical BlackBerry leather finish surrounded by soft-touch rubber.

Because the 9780 is identical to the previous 9700, it comes with the excellent contoured QWERTY keyboard that all BlackBerry smartphones are known for. Although the device doesn’t weigh a lot, the weight distribution itself is very good and typing longer than usual emails on the phone is not a problem. That being said, on our particular review device the plastic tab at the bottom of the keyboard with the operator branding on it would make a creaking sound when pressed on the right (the left side of the tab seemed secure in place). This may very well be a one off, but it was irritating to hear the creaking every time you used the bottom-right of the keyboard as your right thumb would rest over this tab. This whole piece of plastic actually peels up so different plastic inserts (with different carrier branding) can be snapped in place. It feels commoditized because frankly, it is. 

In addition to the keyboard, the Bold is ergonomically spot on for single-handed use, particularly for left handed users. The left-side convenience key falls right under your thumb, the volume buttons under your index finger, and the right-side convenience key under your middle finger. Navigation using the optical track pad is also a smooth experience, although it takes a little getting used to the sensitivity (which can be adjusted of course).

Display and Camera

The one drawback of having a non-slider full QWERTY keypad on a mobile device is the screen real estate you have to give up. The Bold doesn’t try to change this in any way; it maintains the same 2.4” 480x360 resolution display as BlackBerry smartphones of the past. Obviously this makes surfing the internet on the Bold cumbersome, at best, which is sad as we’ll see later that RIM seems to be focusing quite heavily on improving its browser performance. But for almost everything else the display works just fine. Reading emails, chatting and even watching the occasional YouTube video all work well on the Bold’s crisp screen. Visibility outdoors is also not an issue as the light sensor is able to ramp up the brightness sufficiently under direct sunlight.

(Left) The Bold's display is bright and sharp (Right) and the outdoor visibility is pretty good too

The 5MP AF camera with LED Flash on the 9780 is the exact same module as the one found in the Torch 9800. Under naturally well-lit conditions, the 9780's camera can pull off decent shots, but in poorly lit (or even artificially lit) situations, noise becomes increasingly visible. As such, everything that Brian covered in his Torch 9800 review is applicable to the camera found in the 9780 Bold--from the inability to choose what to focus on, to the low-by-todays-standards 640x480 limit on video resolution, and the silly message about how turning the LED flash ON for video will drain the battery faster, everything is the exact same. The only exception is that the image preview frame rate on the Bold seems to be on par with other devices as I could not notice any obvious stuttering.

I apologize for the overcast image and video samples. The Bay area hasn't caught a break in the last couple of weeks when it comes to bad weather! As such, the quality will be worse than what you'd get in better lighting conditions.

Performance and Other Notes

I won’t be covering the details of the features and enhancements that version 6 of the BlackBerry OS brings along here because, as you may have guessed, there is nothing new here compared to what was covered in the Torch review. However, one very important point I would like to bring up is the fact that even though the 9780 is not a touch-screen device, BlackBerry OS 6 works absolutely fine with just the optical keypad and soft-keys, all with no drastic change to the UI. Obviously you lose touch-specific forms of interaction such as double tap and pinch-to-zoom, but you don’t really feel like you’re losing out on something here.

Kudos to RIM for building a UI that is quite adept at handling very different UI interaction paradigms without any major change in the UI structure or presentation itself. The achievement is even more praise worthy in light of the fact that Nokia took so long to get their touch interface right with Symbian^3, and even then the experience can be quite inconsistent across different devices and applications running the same OS.

(Clockwise from top-right) The BB OS 6 homescreen, tabs in the browser,
app updates in the BB App World, menu grid.

Another important point I would like to touch on is that RIM seems to be focusing a lot of their efforts on getting the browser working right. Sure, it only has a 2.4” non-touch screen, but the browser itself seems to be quite up to the task. In fact, compared to Brian’s experience with the Torch, the browser experience on the Bold has definitely improved. Pages load quickly and I found no discernible rendering issues, even on fairly complex sites.  I dug a little deeper and found out that the version of the OS that comes bundled with the Bold 9780 (6.0 bundle 863) is newer than the one currently available for the Torch (6.0 bundle 695); it looks like some of the updates have addressed issues that Brian had on his Torch during the review last September.

After I ran some performance numbers (which were better than what the Torch posted), I checked and found out that there was another update available for the Bold (6.0 bundle 1879). I also noticed that with this latest update, the browser version has also changed to 6.0.0.448 vs the 6.0.0.246 found in the Torch. I re-ran the browser tests and found out that the performance had improved further with this new update. I have therefore included numbers from both versions for your reference. Worth noting is that while the update was just 39MB in size, it took about 40 minutes to finish installing.

The BrowserMark scores went up by 9% after the update, but interestingly the Torch is still slightly faster (4%). The SunSpider scores on the other hand... nope, that’s not a typo. I re-ran the test 5 times, rebooted the phone thrice, and even reset it once. The fact remained that after the latest update, the time to complete the SunSpider benchmark has decreased by a staggering 54% (i.e. it's more than twice as fast). Even without the update, the Bold already took 13% less time than the Torch, which basically has the exact same hardware specs, so there's plenty of tuning happening in relation to this particular test.

Granted that the numbers posted by just one benchmark don’t tell the entire story, but as I mentioned earlier, the browsing experience on the Bold is limited by the form factor itself, not the browser. It looks like RIM has finally been able to assimilate its acquisition of Torch Mobile and have something to show for it. I did not notice any changes to the UI or new features between the different versions of the browser on the Bold or even between the browsers on the Bold and the Torch. Unfortunately, I triple checked and it looks like the Torch doesn't have this update just yet.

Battery Life and Call Quality

The Bold 9780 comes with RIM’s workhorse 5.4Whr M-S1 battery and the overall battery life is very good, in typical BlackBerry fashion. Although you can find specific numbers from our battery life suites listed below, in actual day-to-day use, the phone easily lasted 3 days with normal use that included some calls, texting, emails (push enabled), surfing over WiFi/3G, etc. It felt great to break the habit I had developed of plugging a phone into its charger every night before hitting bed.

Also, aside from Apple whose rated battery life is pretty accurate, there are very few other device vendors who provide even semi-reasonable battery life ratings. RIM on the other hand has gone the other way around and been curiously conservative with its estimates. The 9780 beat RIM's estimated 3G talk time of "up to 6 hours" by posting a time well over that mark of 7 hours and 22 minutes though this was with UMA turned off (as WiFi was turned off).

I also tried running the test with UMA (more on that below), but I realized that the phone arbitarily switches to 3G-only even when its location has not changed. In view of presenting consistent, repeatable results here, I decided to not go ahead with the UMA test. Understandably, the battery life will take a hit using UMA as the 802.11 b/g radio is running in addition to the cellular baseband radio.

Call quality was also pretty good with nothing in particular to report. The speakerphone volume is plenty loud and audible even in moderately noisy environments. If I really wanted to find a fault with the audio quality, it would be that the voice over the speakerphone sounded more ‘tinny’ than it usually does on most mobile phones, but really, that’s just me being picky.

The Bold 9780 switches to UMA mode when it detects a known WiFi network (left)

It is also interesting to note that the Bold 9780 review sample we had, being on the T-Mobile network, supports the UMA standard. Unlicensed Mobile Access is a name given to a technology known as Generic Access Network that allows seamless handoff of GSM/UMTS protocol-traffic between cellular networks and unlicensed spectrum such as 802.11. In other words, UMA can potentially use WiFi networks you have logged into to route phone traffic, thereby improving your network "coverage" and reducing the congestion on the carrier network. Both the device and the network need to support this feature in order for it to work.

Moving on, the Bold 9780 seems to hold onto the signal very well. The antenna is located in the lower middle section of the device, not directly accessible without opening the phone up. Because of this, I had to go through an extraordinary amount of effort to "cup tightly" and register the 19 dBm drop in signal. Likewise, even when held naturally the signal drops by about 11 dBm only in certain cases at locations where I don't get very good coverage. The majority of the time, the Bold showed almost no signal attenuation under normal usage when the cellular coverage is good. This is why I have marked the cupping tightly number for the 9780 with an asterix as it was definitely not normal, even for the tough cupping test.

Update: As pointed out by one of our readers in the comments, I have updated the signal attenuation numbers based on the readout from the hidden Engineering Menu. Thanks for pointing that out Faruk88!

Conclusion: Short, not Sweet

You'll notice this review is shorter than our usual smartphone reviews. The reason, as I’ve already mentioned a couple of times in the article, is quite simple: the Bold 9780 brings absolutely nothing new to the table in terms of hardware, and even the core software is more than half a year old. When you think about the fact that the 9780 is physically identical to the almost 18-month-old 9700 with just a RAM/camera upgrade (plus the fact that the 9700 can also be updated to BlackBerry OS 6 itself), that's pretty slow moving for a competitive market. It's even more of an oddity compared with other vendors like Samsung, LG, and HTC updating their lineup on an almost monthly basis.

That raises the question as to whether RIM has decided to shift focus from the general smartphone market to a more narrow approach targeting enterprise-class customers. Even in the enterprise segment, it faces tough competition in the short term from devices such as the Nokia E5, which offers everything but BES for a much cheaper price and better build quality. There are other companies experimenting with iPhones as corporate mobile devices, and with HP having made it clear that it will be leveraging its clout in the enterprise sector in bringing webOS to market it becomes that much more difficult for RIM in the long term should they choose to continue in their current path. The turn of events at Nokia should be a clear enough signal to RIM that it needs to pull its socks up and keep up with the lightning pace of the mobile industry or get left behind.

As a device in itself, the Bold is pretty good if completely indistinct. There is nothing that stands out in particular, but it gets the job done well enough. While nothing revolutionary has happened on the hardware front just yet, it is good to see that RIM is in fact working in the background trying to tighten up the BlackBerry OS internals. To that effect the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is probably the best BlackBerry you can buy today, by far. The question here is, unless you have no other choice, should you actually buy a BlackBerry over other smartphones currently available…Bold or otherwise? If you're a BlackBerry diehard or have one from your work, that answer will come from their IT department. We've seen some improvements with OS 6 and the Torch, with minor improvements from the Bold, but we'd like to see RIM do more with their next outing.