BlackBerry Bold 9000 Sim Free Smartphone

Let's spoil the story by telling the ending first.
1. Quite possibly the best communication device since the words MOBILE and PHONE got married.
2. It is NOT perfect. There are some (spectacular) flaws to bait critics who are then comprehensively demolished by the no-nonsense approach to BOLDy going about BUSINESS, which is what the (HAL?)9000 is all about.
3. Goodbye "i-Toy"? Not because the 9000 is better, but because the business focus demands you separate the two to such an extent you conclude they defy comparison.

CONTROLS You can "dual thumb" the superb key pad with a fluency that emabrrasses anything with a touch screen including the Apple and BB's own Storm. The trackpoint is a self teaching delight - nothing comes close for ease or flexibility. Combined this must be the end for drumming a stick on your PDA. The display is bright sharp and presents information with executive level clarity. Strictly business - but at it's best but with some glorious touches, BB recogises the protective wallet and shuts off when you return it as well as reading ambient light to adjust screen and backlighting for keys without prompting.

PHONE Only two weak points, numbered keys are small for fast dialing - but it ain't the end of the world, and when you customise the HOME page displays, you can't fix the final locations of your Icons...Yet.

SMARTPHONE You are carrying one of the first generation of "truly" practical handportable computers. It has been done thousands of times before, but if the tools are weak and the keyboard not ergonomic you simply avoid any of the SMART stuff your smartphone is capable of. The Bold 9000 carries a 600mhz chip on board which (for the non-anoraks) makes it as powerful as the laptop you carried in 2000. All talk of applications is also therefore rendered irrelevant by the fact that if you don't like what's on board you can quickly download something better - and you still get to receive and open WORD/EXCEL/POWERPOINT/PDF files fresh out of the box as well as sending all types of windows media. The machine multi-tasks effectively and with stability - listen to music while reading the news (online) with consumate ease.

E-MAIL Definitive. There is a reason that Barrack Obama used one. Set it up (for free)to synchronise your existing e-mail addresses and mail manger and to receive and reply everything you have on your desktop - Fast and reliable to the point of being (office)life-changing!

TEXT Reborn! The 9000 demolishes preconceptions. You find yourself achieving the thing perceived to be most difficult, to type VERY quickly and ACCURATELY without practice. The styling is based on how we would naturally hold something designed to be HAND-HELD and can be navigated or operated beautifully with one hand - try that with a PDA. Still not convinced? Borrow one and find the following:-
First day, you will have remembered how to write in English instead of TXT SPK!. By the second punctuation will have crept in by itself and by the third, you may have discovered that most (non-smartphone) recipients can't digest the seven pages you keep sending them. Trust me - once you start.....etc. It appeases the stubborn with (horrific) predictive text option but whacks that with a real spell checker so choosing is a non-brainer. it also cuts, pastes and responds to all the other controls that Windows has taught you.

INTERNET Read pages EASILY on the widescreen (in "Column" mode Wikipedia reads like a minature book). Scroll and point masterfully with a single hand and it's quick enough for everything short of online form filling. Auto-defaults to the stronger of WiFi/3g/GPRS networks.

MUSIC Everyone notices the 3.5mm headphone socket (yippee!!!) sticking out of the side of the unit instead of the top (aaarggghhh!!!). Detailed and clear music, good enough to disguise the compromises of MP3 until you get home to do it properly and damn loud...if you really must. Onboard music software has all the options and displays all your media player details and album covers.No I-Tunes as standard (so what?), but the chip says "whatever you do want master..." providing you download first. Handy side mounted volume controls and further assignable buttons for (direct music and camera access in my case), plus a head mouned button that acts to pause any active applications. Ships with 2gb (1gb internal and a supplied 1gb micro SD card)as standard with support for up to 8gb Micro SD (£14 on Amazon 2008!) which roughly translated means it's time to auction your i-pod.

CAMERA Only 2mp (cue laughter), but still superbly integrated into the architecture.
Video capture? Well at least this BB does it. Simplicity to manage as a camera. Video file playback is brilliant (literally) only surpassed by i-Phone and viable for watching a whole film on a train.

DIARY Office efficient. This time you WILL throw away your paper version and not fish it back out of the bin later. You can also synchronise the entries with your desktop/laptop so Outlook/Lotus users keep singing.

SAT-NAV - Okay no Tom-Tom, but it does work, is flexible and is perfect for occasional/back up use. You can upload additional applications - e.g. Google Maps so you compensate to preference.

BATTERY strong and challenged only by your temptation to this device to degrees you may never have contemplated before. Charge in 90mins and lasts two days when your flogging it.

The Bold beats no competition on features alone, but is such a cohesively and comprehensively designed solution. It is best not for what IT can do but for what YOU ACHIEVE.

When someone shows off an i-phone they say "WATCH this."
When someone shows of a BB they say "Here, TRY this"
It really is THAT easy!!!

I won't list what it does because there are already plenty of reviews doing that.
So I'll just write about things which I have noticed and am concerned about in the hope that I am being helpful.

I chose the Bold 9000 because it has a wider screen than the other models which were available at the time [Sept 2009] - but I wish I had chosen a model which wasn't so wide. Why? Purely because I am used to texting with one thumb and because the screen is wide, so is the qwerty keyboard, so I can't quite reach across the whole keyboard with one hand. My hands are small, so I should have thought of that, but I didn't. I just thought that a wider screen would be best for viewing You Tube clips - which it is, but now I have to use both hands to type, which is ok, but I would rather be able to type with one. So the large screen which I thought was a plus factor has turned out to be what I don't like about it. But maybe that's just me?

The calendar thingy annoys me. I am used to Nokia phones and their reminder facility which allowed me to set a reminder to notify me on a certain date at a certain time. That system was flexible. The Blackberry system is not. Click on the calendar icon, choose the day you want to set a reminder for and you get a list of times [in hourly intervals] from 2am to 8pm.
The reminder alarm notifies you fifteen minutes before the hour you have chosen. Which is fair enough, but what if you want to remind yourself to do something between 8pm and 2am?????? I appreciate that the Blackberry is designed for business people and the reminder is really to notify them of the timing of a business meeting or appointment, but what about the rest of us? I would like to set reminders to myself for whatever time of day or night I choose. My forgetfulness does not stop between the hours of 8pm and 2am!
I have knocked a star off the rating because of this. Every other mobile phone I have owned has allowed me to set a reminder at any hour I chose. It never occurred to me that a Blackberry would not have a function I assumed was a basic one on every phone.

Having access to emails is very useful. Especially because if an email has an attachment, you can read the attachment [if you trust the sender, of course.] And setting up the Blackberry to receive emails is easy. But, bear in mind that if you set up hotmail or live.com email addresses on it you will have to re-validate each of them every 90 days if you want the Blackberry to continue receiving emails sent to those addresses.
No one told me that. The instruction booklet makes no mention of it either. So when I received emails from Blackberry asking me to re validate passwords, I was concerned about security. I did not know whether they were genuine or not. So I waited until I got home and did a bit of reading on the internet. I discovered that the messages were genuine and having to re-validate passwords on these accounts is normal.

I have struggled with assigning the ringtone of my choice to the number of my choice. The instruction booklet isn't really very helpful. In fact it is very sketchy. I would have liked a lot more information. The manufacturers assume we all know a lot about these things to start with. But some of us don't. So I have knocked a star off the rating to reflect the sketchiness of the instruction booklet.
When a voicemail has been left by someone, the voicemail rings you several times if you don't answer immediately. I would like to assign a ringtone to the voicemail - but have been unable to do it. I would also like to use music which is stored in my music folder on the blackberry rather than the ones which come with the phone, but, again I have struggled to do this. The instructions could be MUCH better.
The camera isn't too good but I have a digital camera so I don't expect the camera on my phone to be as good as that.
Other than that, it's a nice piece of kit.
Way too pricey though. But aren't they all?

EDIT 15th Nov 2010 -
I have worked out how to assign a ringtone to voice mail. I added the voicemail number [121 for vodafone] to my list of contacts and assigned it a ring tone of its own.
And thanks to one of the comments left on here, there are now instructions on how to amend the times on the reminder calendar to suit your own preference.

Also, my blackberry bold 9000 phone was under a two year plan, and after having it for about 13 months, the volume of the ringer went really quiet. I couldn't hear calls or texts even when on 'loud.'
I contacted vodafone and they said this was a known issue with this model and they sent a new one by courier and took the old phone back. No questions asked.
The new phone looked the same but things were different on it! And no one told me. Grrrr.
For instance, I used to lock the screen by pressing in the button on the left hand side. Now when I press that button I get a voice dialling facility speaking to me and bleeping! Aaaaargh. I hate it.
I discovered a wonderful source of info called "Crackberry" Forums and found out that now in order to lock the screen, I must press and hold down for three seconds the '*' button.
These forums seem to have pretty much any solution to any Blackberry related problem.

For some reason people seem to always compare the Bold to the i-phone... and it's a bit like a motoring review comparing a Mondeo to an MX 5. Both cost about the same, and both are very good at fulfilling certain functions, but clearly they're never going to appeal to the same market!

Let's keep this simple : If you want a smartphone to surf the web, use as a MP3 player all the time, but also send and receive the odd e mail or message with - get an i-phone.

If you want a smartphone that makes sending and receiving e mails a doddle, and you'd also like to surf the web and listen to music sometimes - get one of these.

...it's really that basic!