BlackBerry Bold 9780 review

RIM's Bold range of handsets hass been doing pretty well.

The 9000, 9700 and now 9780 are all aimed at the consumer and they really are all smartphone powerhouses.

The 9780 is the newest on the block and takes the popular Bold 9700, but adds a delightful twist in the form of BlackBerry OS 6 and some improved hardware.

Thing is, the BlackBerry Bold 9780, in terms of looks, is practically the same as its predecessor the BlackBerry Bold 9700. It’s the same shape, size (109 x 60 x 14 mm) and form. The screen is identical, as is the Qwerty. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any physical differences between the two handsets.

So what is the Bold 9780, then? Simple: it’s a slightly more powerful version of the Bold 9700. That’s it.

If we were being harsh we’d say it was boring and rather typical of RIM to just re-release its most popular handset with improved hardware and OS but we’re not going down this route – and this is for two reasons.

One: we really like the Bold 9700, so we’ll probably feel the same about the Bold 9780 and Two: RIM has never claimed the device is anything more than a rebooted version of the Bold 9700.

As we said, the Bold 9780 has slightly improved hardware. For starters, there’s the camera, which at 5-megapixels, is a big improvement on the Bold 9700’s 3.2-megapixel offering.

Face Detection, Portrait, Sports, single shot and continuous autofocus are now all available within the Bold 9780’s camera options as well, which make taking decent shots a hell of a lot easier.

RIM has also doubled up the RAM to 512MB and the Bold 9780’s external storage can be expanded up to 32GB via its microSD card slot – the Bold 9700’s was limited to 16GB.

This extra storage space and RAM come in very handy because the device feels snappier when multitasking and you’ve also got twice as much room onboard for things like music, apps and videos, which is always a good thing.

The screen is exactly the same as the Bold 9700’s 2.44-inch 480x360 pixel display, which is slightly disappointing as it would have been nice to see an improvement in this aspect as well.

As you’d expect with a RIM handset, the Bold 9780 is fully kitted out for all your professional and casual email and messaging needs with full support for MAP, POP3, SMTP, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino and BlackBerry Connect clients.

In terms of connectivity, you’ve got 3G, GPRS, EDGE and Wi-Fi support – although, bizarrely not ‘n’ – so, once again, the same as you get on the Bold 9700. Nevertheless, we would have liked ‘n’ connectivity on the Bold 9780, especially since the Pearl 3G has it. Why RIM chose to omit it this now standard level of connectivity from the Bold 9780 is beyond us – maybe it just forgot?

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