BlackBerry Bold 9780: Not So Bold

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.