Raphide

Stephen Fry wrote an interesting review on gadgets last December.

Here’s an excerpt:

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My very first blog to my website was on the subject of Smartphones. ‘I never met a smartphone I didn’t buy,’ I wrote with somewhat overcooked hyperbole. So nearly true as to be worth the mangling of Will Rogers’ famous, (and equally unbelievable) claim. Incidentally, I was faintly horrified to note, while seeking a good site to link to Will Rogers, that Barry Manilow wrote a song with that same title, whose lyrics are written out here with an illiteracy so fantastic as almost to be beautiful. Eek.

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Don’t you sometimes long to be CEO of a company like Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia or Microsoft? So that you can say to your coders, your designers, your development teams and your software architects: “Not Fucking Good Enough. I haven’t said ‘Wow’ yet. I haven’t gasped with pleasure, amusement or admiration once. Start again. Not Fucking Good Enough.”

And (forgive this ranting sidebar) how one would lay into the packaging department! “Nowhere near Fucking Good Enough. I’m not enjoying opening this. It’s clumsy, dumb and contemptuous. I’m in product-opening hell. Not Fucking Good Enough.”

Oh, yes Stephen. That’s all very well, but you try being a CEO in the real world of share prices and financial officers. Bullshit. Any CEO who hides behind his shareholders isn’t worthy of their job: I’ve met enough business leaders to know that the good ones lead, they don’t follow. Isn’t that kind of what ‘leader’ means? I seem to be straying. But it’s all relevant really and it all needs saying again and again. Managers, corporates, finance people, executives in tech companies – they all need to understand for the sake of their pride and happiness as much as their success, this simple rule: ‘That’ll do’ won’t do. ‘That’s good enough’ is never good enough.

And so we come to the three products under advisement. I shall start with the Blackberries. Throughout their six year history RIM have produced excellently serviceable messaging phones. That is what they are all about. Instant pushed email with no frills for the business consumer. You don’t need me to tell you that this approach has earned RIM and their phone a kind of cult metonymical status. Now, in the Post iPhone era, they appear to have come to the conclusion that this is not enough. Either that or they feel they have more or less saturated their existing core market and now wish to move into fresh woods and pastures new. A sudden blizzard of new RIM devices has hit and is hitting the market. The Bold is a legato evolution, the Storm a break into strident falsetto while the Pearl/Kickstart 8820 clamshell flip phone might be regarded as a melody in an altogether different key. I have had no access to the Kickstart, though with WiFi capabilities, a 2 mp camera, quad band EDGE and an all new form factor it looks like a larky entry level winner.

THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

So let’s begin with the Bold, pausing only to reflect on the horror of its name. A detergent with built in softener, a polari code word, a Merseyside district, an emphatic typographical style – all of those may be said to be bold, yes. But a phone? ‘Do you want to see my Bold?’ Very odd.

At first glance the RIM Blackberry 9000 Bold, to give it its proper designation, looks a little fatter than either the 83×0 Curve or the shiny piano black 88×0. A band of silvery metal (which turns out to be plastic) surrounds the candybar body lending it a faintly iPhonic appearance, but the classic keyboard, pearl trackball and BB logo menu key soon remind us that we’re in RIMland. Less sculpted than the Curve, this is a device that nonetheless fits very well in the hand, most of the pleasure deriving from the design of the back, whose faux leather texture and softly rounded corners feel and look immensely satisfactory. An external flap for a micro SD card means we can kiss goodbye to the boredom of having to jerk out the battery every time we want to change memory cards. Otherwise the usual assignable function buttons, a standard 35mm stereo jack (thank heavens we have seen the last of the horrid days of freakish proprietary earphone sockets – or have we? More later) a mini USB port and a standby/mute button complete the exterior hardware features.

It is the screen that takes up all our attention. This Half VGA 480x 320 display is an absolute honey. The images are crisper, clearer and brighter than you could possibly have expected. Moving and still images dazzle with their pleasing clarity and depth of colour.

The only really new capability on this phone is 3G. RIM has bowed to the inevitable and sacrificed some of the BlackBerry’s fabled battery life for the sake of being able to badge it as a speedster. Emails don’t arrive any faster, because they couldn’t be quicker than they always were on EDGE and GPRS anyway. 3G is only justified for OTA app/file downloading or power web browsing and is the BlackBerry a phone where you are likely to do much of either? The in-house browser is not very good and likes nothing better than to visit a site and then throw up a warning screen that says “The XML is not well formed” or something equally rude and stupid. It does offer the possibility of online video, but only from the few compatible sites that offer 3GPP RTSP streaming. There is also the boredom of it expressing itself as either the badged network provider browser, in my case Orange, or splitting itself in two when using Wi-Fi and calling itself a HotSpot Browser. All very silly and lazy. Most users will prefer to download Opera Mini which while certainly better, calls up the built-in browser anyway whenever there’s downloading to be done.

As far as other apps are concerned, I have given up trying to persuade the GooSync client for synchronising Google Calendars to work. It needs to piggyback off a deeply unsatisfactory application called SyncJe which Simply Won’t Work. I did manage to download Twitterberry which functions adequately without being any of fluent, function rich, legible or appealing.

BlackBerry Maps of course, Simply Won’t Work either. But then they never have on any of the half dozen or so models of BlackBerry I’ve owned in my absurd life. I sometimes wonder if Wayfinder or another third party provider of navigation software doesn’t pay RIM or the network providers a kickback of some kind. When fired up, the BB Maps application (mapplication?) offers a splashscreen that tells me that I don’t have a BES or BIS connection, which is manifestly untrue since BIS is cheerfully pushing emails at me faster than Bendick’s pushes out Bittermints. The same is true on the BlackBerry Storm, so it seems to be horribly usual. How they get away with advertising their map service I can’t imagine, when a quick search through the help forums seems to show that BB Maps works for just about NO ONE.

But then – and one can’t repeat this often enough – that isn’t the point of BlackBerry. The point of BlackBerry is fast and furious emailing. Instant Messaging out of the box, it must be confessed, is limited to PIN2PIN chats between fellow BlackBerry users, but IM clients like VeriChat and Gizmo allow the usual AIM, Yahoo, Google and MS chatter. SMS texting is reasonably well threaded, but email … well, it’s hard to explain to the uninitiated quite why the BB email experience is so satisfying, but deeply, joyfully satisfying it is. And now, with the Bold, it is even more so. For the Bold is not just a new box, it brings with it a new operating system, version 4.6, which amongst other things offers correctly formatted HTML emails. Well, jolly nearly correctly formatted – correctly formatted for the screen, shall we say? The annoyingly overprotective options don’t allow you automatically to see the images in your email (I’m talking about images embedded in the format here, not attachments) until you select the option from your menu each time for each email. But again, some BB aficionados will see graphical email as completely unBlackBerry anyway and won’t mind a bit.

OS 4.6 offers fabulous speed and smoothness from its 624MHz Intel XScale PXA 270 processor. The fonts are gorgeous and automatically anti-aliased, without the need for the font smoothing option of old. The charming white-light neon outline icons of the home screen are not always easy to interpret, but you soon get the idea. In Britain, the Bold comes exclusively from Orange, in America AT&T have that honour. The Orange handset I have comes with two themes: Precision Orange and Precision Silver. Icons, settings, shortcuts, trackball, autotext (one of BlackBerry’s clinching USPs) and menus work the same way they have for years on BlackBerry so it’s an easy transition from a Curve, Pearl or 8800. The same but better, smoother, faster, prettier.

It seems that early releases of the Bold were so problematic that Orange in the UK actually yanked it from their list of phones for a while. All seems to be well now, although the Orange badged version doesn’t allow the Wireless updating of the system that is a vaunted feature in other territories, nor the implementation of GPS ephemeris for star-gazers. Maybe some kind of update will help.

The media browsing and playing is much as it has been since the first Pearl models, hardly up to iPhone or iPod standard, but the new screen though small, presents knockout video and photo reproduction. There seems to be an improvement in the built-in speakers too. You wouldn’t use them to play music at a country house rave, but for reference and handsfree talk they are much better than once they were and better than the iPhone can offer. You can’t say that about the camera however. Same resolution as the iPhone’s at 2 megapixels, but a woefully less impressive lens and end product. To compensate, you can geotag your photos and there is an adequate video capture programme too.

Only a gigabyte of onboard memory is offered, but this can be supplemented by up to 16GB via the MicroSD slot (some rumours suggest 32GB is possible). Included as standard are voice recording, voice dialling, some dumb but prettily implemented games, a suite of Dataviz document readers (which can become full read/write apps if you pay for an upgrade), a calculator, a memopad and a sweet little alarm/clock/stopwatch with a cunning bedside mode. No front-facing lens for video chat though.

Power will be drained if you use too many of the radios at the same time, so best go with GPS and Bluetooth off unless you really need them. Once you’ve tired of seeing the strange sight of “3G” on a BlackBerry screen you might as well go to phone options and choose an EDGE connection. It will save you a lot of battery life and you’ll lose little functionality.

Text input is achieved via a keyboard slightly different from that of the Curve and, in my opinion at least, better. I think I can type faster and more accurately on a BB Bold than on any make of phone I’ve ever used. The Palm Treo 650 used to take that prize, but I think the design, ergonomics and heft of the Bold edge out that beloved old Treo. The usual small annoyances remain (surely RIM can come up with a better shift and alt lock? Why not a double press in each case?) but all in all it’s a fine and serviceable keyboard.

In short the Bold is a superb evolution of a winning formula (if formulae can be said to evolve): it looks and feels attractive, solid and well-made. The software architecture and hardware design complement each other perfectly. Above all it remains wholly, proudly and properly a BlackBerry. It is, to be sure, no threat to the iPhone except in one regard: devoted BlackBerry users will be less anxious and uncertain than they might have done a month or so ago. They will feel proud, happy and loved once again and all thoughts of moving to iPhone will vanish away.

RIM BlackBerry 9000 Bold
Stars •••• (4/5)

Operating System: v4.6.0.xxx
Processor: Intel XScale PXA270 @ 624MHz
Network: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA (Quad band)
Display: HVGA 65,000 Color LCD (480×320). Backlighting. Light sensing screen.
Camera: 2MP
Wi-Fi: 802.11 a/b/g
GPS: Built in (A)
Battery:1500mAh 13.5 days on standby, 4.5 hours talk time
Weight: 136 grams, 4.8 oz
Card slot: MicroSD, (TransFlash), microSDHC
On board memory: 1 GB
Media player: MP3, AAC+, WMA etc
Video player: WMV, 3GP, MPEG4, H.263/4, MPEG4, DivX, Xvid

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