Gadgetory

what's up everyone John rhett endure from TechnoBuffalo here with a head-to-head comparison of the old versus the new we've got the former top-of-the-line blackberry the Bold 97-80 against the new king in town at the 9900 we're going to put these two head-to-head and see the differences really are so with very little doubt the 9900 is a superior phone from almost all stand points than 97-80 but the big question is how much better is it and it's that difference going to be worth an upgrade for you is it going to be worth you wanted to buy a new one or perhaps getting a great deal on a discounted 97-80 let's go ahead and put all these guys through the test and see how things come out just to sort of keep things fair we're going to do a complete reboot of both devices so we're starting from least a fair comparison purposes so I'm gonna go and pull the battery on that I'll pull the battery here as well we're going to go ahead and run through the specs of both of these as they start to boot up then I'll probably have to speed it up because this guy takes quite a while to boot up so battery's pulled here on the 9900 it's been pulled pop that back in and I want to do this on camera so you guys can see that we are running this is fair comparisons as we can do here alright so let these guys boot up want to go ahead and run through all the specs on both of these so this is the Bold 97-80 this is an unlocked version which is using a T's 3G networks it's running OS 6 as compared to the 9900 running blackberry OS 7 more on that later two point four four inch non capacitive non-touchscreen at all versus a larger 2.8 inch this is a touchscreen resolution here was a bit low on the 480 by 360 if you looked at images or text you certainly noticed it higher resolution here 640 by 480 from a weight standpoint 122 grams and a little bit heavier but not much at a hundred and thirty grams a bit of an anemic 624 megahertz processor here and a much faster borderline modern processor 1.2 gigahertz 512 megabytes of RAM 768 megabytes of RAM they both rock by megapixel cameras well this guy can shoot 720p video but does not have autofocus unfortunately they tried to keep the fitness down so the autofocus sensor got axed 512 megabytes of storage and 8 gigs of storage so there's a lot of differences here in specs I wanted to sort of show you and tell you at least what those were so while these guys are booting up I will come right back alright so our full boot ups are completely done I've used both these songs as my daily driver I used a 97-80 for about two months and a 9900 I've had for just about two weeks since it first came out if you want to see my review and 9,900 link for that will be down below so we're going to talk about size keyboard navigation speed feel OS and some button business let's first talk about the size this is a pretty big blackberry harkens back to the old 9000 the original bold and clearly see that this is a much larger phone and you feel that difference when it's in your pocket you can see that screen size right there when you're stacked up on top of each other do a little more level there you go and now you can see that it is definitely a larger phone certainly the thinnest blackberry around so those make up for it in that department but if we're going to keep this in your pocket and you're wearing some skinny jeans you're definitely going to know that it is in there alright so let's talk about the big thing here what makes a blackberry bold a blackberry bold and what blackberry is really known for and that is this keyboard so the keyboard I 97-80 was a pretty solid keyboard it worked well keys were a bit small I've got pretty decent sized thumbs and they able to get used to it pretty quickly in fact I thought this was one of the better certainly not the best but a very decent usable keyboard now if we jump on over to the larger keys here on the 9900 about six percent bigger and boy you feel that six percent this keyboard is absolutely amazing as hands down the best keyboard I have ever typed on easily besting the outstanding HTC status and a t-mobile sidekick 4G this keyboard is unbelievably easy to type on the keys feel a bit different they've got a bit more click eNOS to them something you have to really feel to try it for yourself with a keyboard here absolutely awesome if you are a heavy email or a texter you are definitely going to want to try this phone if you've gotten used to let's say and on-screen keyboard like an iPhone or someone one of the Android devices this is going to be a really welcome experience I got really used to fit the virtual keyboards I was an iPhone user and I got very quick at it this I am probably twice as fast and twice as accurate really an amazing typing experience and once I started getting used to physical keyboards I remember why I liked them so much so definitely a huge step up there's a reason alone to upgrade difference in keyboards from this to this ah definitely takes that cake alright so let's talk about navigation so you want to navigate the BlackBerry or any BlackBerry prior really this one exception the torch you got to use this guy you can never get around you can scroll go to different panels find what you want doing this not gonna do much for you other than maybe dent your screen now you've got that same sort of navigation options you can go ahead and have to get around just as you could on the other phone you can see how it kind different stuff there's things there you can swipe different panels however now you can also do this and you can tap things you can go back and flick sir yes I'm sure you can navigate with your finger hooray because it is a touchscreen it also means like things like websites for example you could pinch to zoom I'll talk about that in just a minute you don't have to navigate any more with just your finger which is pretty awesome so let's take a look at media we'll go ahead and look at pictures for example and let's take a look at some wallpapers to look at that one that's pretty if you wanted to zoom in on the old wallpapers here we go to media go and do that same thing pictures let's go down to wallpapers and find one look similar how about well it ones close out you want to zoom in you had a select it and it keeps ooming and here if you want to zoom you can just do that it's actually very very smooth at 1.2 gigahertz processor with the graphics acceleration really is quite nice rim is calling that liquid graphics which is really code for our phones not slow anymore things actually work for anybody who ever used in older blackberry being tried to install an application you constantly had that little ticking thing that went around or just using the phone you had taking thing that went around and rendered the phone I'm usable until it was done thinking I've very rarely seen that on this phone even when I'm downloading an application surprise surprise I can still use a phone that's like you can on every other modern device so hooray for rim for throwing some pretty decent hardware now behind their operating system so much faster experience overall alright so let's go ahead and talk about speed we're going to talk about burroughs air speed now and to do that I'm going to do a clearing of cache and all that business so we've got a apples to apples comparison so I'll run down to options scroll down here we'll go ahead and clear cookies will clear them everything clear now I want to do this again live on camera so you guys can see that there's no funny business going on nothing's being edited I do have the mobile network turned off on both of these this is my regular phone and didn't want it to ring or buzz they're connected both to the same Wi-Fi network so I'll do the same thing here it's rolling over to browser I'll go to options options and we'll clear everything out here as well all right clear cookies because nobody likes cookies push content and we will clear now delete cleared memory all right so everything is now good to go let's go ahead and open up one of my favorite blackberry site instead I've been reading quite a bit let's go and check out crack break well go ahead and load that up here even typing again on this keyboard after using the 9900 just feels weird just feels worse you'll have a good anymore crackberry.com all right I will do the same thing on this guy all right so should be much easier now to get these to go at the same time get into the same Wi-Fi network everything's been cleared a know ATT going on here that's been turned off it's on the same Wi-Fi alright so let's go ahead and load them up and it's going to load the mobile version so I showed up here first on the 97-80 and is not yet shown on the 9900 still loading there we go and it loaded the same webpage so you can scroll through H no checkerboard scroll through here no checkerboard let's go and look at some navigation so here's the article there's an article here's an article if you want to zoom in sir tap it sometimes you never get to hit the option and zoom in you can do some keyboard shortcuts to a bust easiest way to zoom here pinch and zooming works very well look at that it's smooth and it's fluid hooray for that alright so now we've looked at crack break aam it's been loaded here for the first time what if it was already stored in our memory we'd already looked at it before it's like that we viewed quite a bit let's go ahead and refresh it and see what was going to happen so we'll go ahead and hit enter hit enter and see if that speed is any different I ate this one maybe a second before just as a heads up so almost identical here from speed Department let's go ahead and try loading a few more websites let's try my favorite sports site ESPN it's going to load the mobile versions of each of these and again never been loaded on either DS tap that ESPN ESPN I got that already queues it up there and we'll do ESPN here esp-2 type in you thank you yes p.m. that didn't launch it upper dot-com all right so we're going to go to the mobile versions of both of these we'll go ahead and hit go go and we are off doing some ESPN action so a little bit quicker here on the 9900 low times generally I found a 9900 to be a little bit faster but not by much but once the page is loaded you can only see difference between the two here the browser speed is supposedly about 40% faster on OS 6 at a hundred percent faster than OS 5 so you've got the same things here at pinch to zoom and is very smooth the fluid as smooth and fluid as androids been or iOS so really nice job with the browser so if you were a blackberry user in the browser was important to you you're finally gonna have something decent all right it's going to take a look at some apps let's open up see what kind of download stuff I've got stored in here go ahead keep trying scroll over to my finger not going to work so let's open up some applications let's say I want to open up what's similar let's go ahead and try Google Maps oh it's not going to load up probably but you can get a sense of speed so I'll do Google Maps here Google Maps here and open well I'm not connected not probably the best test slice to say that this is actually much much much faster whether or not you're launching menus or moving around moving around applications here you have several things open at once you really notice the speed of the extra RAM now really enjoy the 9900 it's you don't notice that things are slowing down whereas an older BlackBerry device you're very cognizant of things you could and could not do and anybody you use an older BlackBerry device no yeah it's sort of live within its limitations not so much anymore you can actually use your phone like a normal phone so hooray for that alright let's talk about the feel of both these phones it seems like a weird thing to talk about the feel of the phone but it's very important here with these two all plastic here on the 97-80 I got sort of that aluminum or aluminium depending on where you are feel and look to it plastic you can hear already got some creaks to it it has a nice quality build but it feels a little bit cheap because all the plastic here with that metal accents that sort of woven glass back soft touch on the sides this film feels really solid in the hand and it feels really great to hold into use this one felt cheap certainly the thinner side but it wasn't awful I had a bit of a hollow feel to it there's a bit of room here between the battery door and where the battery actually is not so much here so there's a much more solid feel to it I like the way this feels in the hand it definitely feels a bit more solid speaking of having the phone in the hand speaker quality is absolutely outstanding here that any 900 on the 97 ATI to have the volume turned all the way up to have sort of ample while making a phone call here about 60% it's perfect for me so speaker volume is really loud on the 9900 alright so talk a bit about OS I'm not going to get too much in detail about OS 7 so I've covered it sort of to death but there are differences here so you can scroll around through all your panels so now you can get rid of panel so I only have media all' and download here you can't really do that so I got downloads frequent all favorites and then media so a little bit of a tweak I've got some voice search here now so I can search for voice didn't have that here overall some niceties beneath the surface here with the OS 7 who got that liquid graphics which is code again for our phones not slow one of the things I don't like the sort of kind of nitpicky I want to scroll up in screen to screen it sort of locked right that see that if I don't go all the way it sort of snaps back I know it's because I'm not going all that far but I wish if it knew I was moving there that it would just continue to scroll through screens but stuff is very smooth here to liquid graphics do work very very nicely so strange to sort of talk about you know all of that how it feels with your finger it's certainly going to be subjective Oh from my standpoint it really makes all the difference one of my complaints I had with the 97-80 was at the top of the phone here this is how you unlocked or locked the phone you pulled it out of your pocket sometimes if you put it down face down into your jeans or whatever you're wearing you'd hit this button and something you realize that your pants felt very very hot cuz your phone a bit on for a few hours and your battery was getting drained um it was just very easy to hit on to the other side of that so on the right was the mute button on the top of the 9900 that's been fixed you now have a almost recessed power button which if anything is a bit hard to hit you're not going to edit by acting definitely got it people know that you're want to hit that and that mute button has been moved to the middle of the volume rocker which is a bit oh when you have the phone up the side of your head you want to adjust the volume generally you think of just having two buttons you have to serve train yourself to think there's let up down and then one in the middle so a little something to keep in mind overall I have been absolutely ecstatic and thrilled with the 9900 the phone is quick it's fast handles email with awesome alacrity it just does a really really nice job of everything I've thrown at it here apps turn there aren't as many apps as other ecosystems and that's only one of the knocks on RAM and black bear as a whole it's once you use the phone it's pretty solid with the ecosystem of getting stuff onto it and transferring information can certainly be less let's just say eloquent which is sort of a bad word to use elegance elegance what I'm thinking of less elegant than other ecosystems but I love the 9900 it's going to be my daily driver for the foreseeable future I wish it a better battery life we have about a 12 hundred or so milliamp hour battery here in about a fifteen hundred million power battery here and you have to be very judicious with your battery on the 9900 sorry I have to turn my brightness all the way down to about 50% I usually am a high brightness kind of guy and if I'm near an outlet I'm gonna plug it in for about an hour so so better your life certainly not outstanding so this has been a comparison head-to-head if you will of the 97-80 versus 9900 and in my humble reviewing opinion isn't extremely worthy upgrade um I just can't tell you how much this experience as a whole has been improved from little things like the glowing trackpad to the awesome awesome keyboard and field vos 9900 finally is a blackberry that BlackBerry users deserve I'm John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo and I'll see you next video bye-bye