Review: BlackBerry Bold 9900

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is an incredibly user-friendly phone. It also comes loaded with great applications, and bar the disappointing camera, I really had very few bones to pick with this device.

Research In Motion's latest offering has a sleek and solid design, with black and metallic finishes that scream business executive. The phone weighs in at 130g with dimensions and well-rounded corners that ensure it sits comfortably in your hand.

Holding the phone and typing with one hand was an absolute pleasure. The backlit keyboard was also a real winner for me. I found the design allowed for very fast typing, which is great for anyone drafting lengthy e-mails on the go, or for live tweeting at an event.

The screen sits snugly on the front panel of the phone.

The combination of touch-screen with a scroll-pad and keyboard make this phone very easy to use. The home screen allows for a fair amount of customisation. You can choose which six applications you would like on the home screen, and simply pressing the scroll-pad will bring up the other applications.

It took me a little while to get used to the receive button because it isn't the standard green used on most phones. However, once I got used to this, I welcomed the change, because frankly, the green doesn't look as elegant. The sound quality was great, and overall making and receiving calls was a pleasure.

The Bold 9900 has a VGA 640 x 480 high-resolution, 28-inch screen (measured diagonally). The screen size is adequate for watching the odd video clip, and is definitely large enough to read mails and type SMSes. A larger screen would have been better for multimedia features like YouTube and viewing photos. However, if you're not prepared to go fully touch-screen, you have to make way for the keyboard.

The phone comes with Bluetooth 2.1 and WiFi. I found the browser incredibly fast. YouTube clips took mere seconds to buffer, and then played without any hanging.

The phone also features near field communication (NFC) technology. This means you can share files between other NFC-enabled devices by simply tapping the phones together.

The 9900's MP3 player is great and plays a wide selection of files. The sound quality is also very good.

The camera was disappointing, however. It only has 5MP, so you're not going to get any noteworthy snaps with this phone. Also, the absence of a front-facing camera means the phone is not able to perform video calling, which I found disappointing in a high-end smartphone.

However, the camera does have HD video recording and 4x optical zoom. It also has a flash, and comes with face-detection and image stabilisation technology.

The Bold comes with a number of cool apps pre-installed. For starters, it has YouTube and a Maps app. The YouTube app is simple, but it's a great way to access the site. The Maps app is fast and easy to use, which is all I need from a navigation app.

The phone also comes with Facebook and Twitter apps, both of which I really liked. They come with notifications, and you can set the frequency of new notifications to a time interval that suits you.

Smartphone battery life is always somewhat disappointing. Having said that, the Bold lasts a day if you put it to heavy use, and only takes a few hours to charge.

As long as the battery is fully charged at the start of your working day, the phone will not let you down.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 is an elegant phone that is well equipped to meet the needs of most executives. Without a front-facing camera, the Bold is unable to compete with the top-end smartphones on the market; but then, it is considerably cheaper than other high-end phones.