Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review for u of rims latest flagship this is the bold 9900 let's go ahead and see if it's the Canadian company Saviour alright so let me remind you of the specs here of the bold 9900 first it's got a larger the largest on a blackberry with a keyboard the non-sliding form-factor 2.8 inch diagonal screen at the resolution of 640 by 480 1.2 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor 768 megabytes of RAM 5 megapixel camera live it on the back with LED flash but no autofocus talk about that in a minute it's got a 1230 milliamp hour battery and NFC technology which stands for near field communications it's a way to transmit data alright so as with all my phone reviews I always start by talking about how the thing does as a phone no matter what it can do for email or browser or pictures doesn't make good phone calls not much used to you this thing makes absolutely tremendous phone calls and probably as one of the strongest antennas out of any AT&T phone I've tested generally I'm pretty blanketed in HSPA+ where I am in Southern California on the bold 9900 I had five strong Barger service where generally I've got maybe three to four I've been using this phone as my daily driver since I got and actually have not had a single dropped call and this is an unlocked unit unlocked from the Canadian carrier Rogers but will be identical to what we seen launched for AT&T and there'll be some band difference when we see it on t-mobile and when we have it on Verizon which we do have now in the 9930 and for Sprint in the 9930 so antenna wise this thing is absolutely outstanding the speaker quality is very loud on previous blackberries I was using the 97-80 I too had the speaker up at 100 here and had it up at a hundred I was almost deaf I had to turn down just about 80 so speaker quality is very loud everything on this phone has to do that has to do with phone calls is absolutely out standing alright let's go ahead and talk about this big old keyboard here is gigantic and the biggest keyboard that RIM has ever used and I gotta say my previous favorite keyboard was surprisingly HTC status before this guy takes the crown the keyboard on this phone is absolutely wonderful here I can go ahead and type things really fast it just works very well this is one of those keyboards they need to try in your hands first to see what it feels like there's a lot of tap to response everything you loved about the original bold feel of the 9000 is here just a bigger form factor if you type a lot of email text messages or Iams this keyboard cannot be beat it is hands-down the best thing I have ever typed on in fact I look forward to replying to emails now in text because it means I get to use this keyboard that translates a fewer mistakes and quicker actually much quicker typing the keyboard is outstanding I can't say enough for how good this keyboard actually is a rim completely nailed it alright let's go ahead and talk about speed I was using a 97 80 before this and that thing was not a speed demon I can't tell you how many times that see little hourglass or that little sort of black box with the ticker going around it used to see that all the time I was installing an application it would pretty much lock the BlackBerry not a problem here at all speed this thing is really fast rims included graphics acceleration which they're calling liquid graphics which makes for a just a very fast browsing experience everything just works applications load very quickly when you're downloading applications thing just things just open and just work very well then go ahead and launch them stuff that I've got here it's go ahead and check out Google Maps go ahead and launch this very quickly even if it was stored in the background on stuff that wasn't stored just launches very very fast so go ahead and launch this for the first time actually Flixter with Rotten Tomatoes and there it goes up and running you can actually use the phone and out when you're downloading an application which is even better that's not the only kind of speed that you guys want to see let's check out some of the browser speed so go ahead and take a look here here's the mobile version ESPN on a blackberry of this form factor check this out boom pinch to zoom I'm pretty fast pinch to zoom I might say as well scrolling is very very smooth here on the back end and OS seven there's some JavaScript improvement and some better rendering of HTML stuff but all that translates to is are really surprisingly Pleasant black browsing experience it just works very very well something I've really enjoyed using let's go ahead and check out one of the sites I've been looking at quite a bit on regards to this phone let's go and check out CrackBerry crackberry.com there we go and let's see what a website looks like I've turned off the mobile network here it just pa+ cuz I am using this as my phone and I didn't want the phone to ring as I was using it so it loads you know very quickly I've been really surprised of what room is done with this browser you actually have a browser that you can use as opposed to what we had with previous Blackberry phones this is a very competitive browsing experience to what we see on Android iOS and web OS I know that sounds very weird to hear and it sounds even weirder to say but you've got a full functioning browser here which is surprisingly nice rim you can tell did quite a job trying to get this thing to work so hats off to them let's talk a bit about the design because this is sort of a new design here you've got a brushed aluminum band all the way across the device on the bottom here where there's some inductive charging ports this is actually plastic so they don't have sort of an antenna gate issue all the antennas here live at the bottom so you have to worry about them being surrounded by the metal they never be able to tell it's plastic actually had to give it a good feel to tell that aluminum goes all the way around on the top of the device where we used to have the mute and lock button you now just have a lock button which can be a bit hard to press really got to get in there and get it and a mute button now lives in between the volume controls now I shouldn't be complaining too much one of the knocks I had on the original design was that I'd push the unlock button too easily so now it's a little bit harder to push I got to be careful what you wish for I will say that having the mute button in the middle is a bit confusing sometimes that I'm trying to adjust a volume I figure top and bottom that's what I use and I end up doing volume up and a mute something to keep in mind it is a very nice looking phone it's nothing a little bit wider than previous generation blackberries but not too bad so I bring in for example the 97-80 the phone it replaced you can really see the thickness difference there so it's not the necessarily the smallest phones but it's definitely one of the thinnest go ahead and see that right there if we bring in something like let's say an iPhone 4 forth in this comparison you can see how thin this device really is but that thinness did come with some compromises here they did remove on the back the autofocus camera with thinness in mind these that's what RIM said either removed it so they could keep the device with this form factor so no autofocus camera here guys the back it looks like carbon fiber is actually woven glass you've got some sort of soft touch band all the way around it NFC antenna actually lives right behind this door kind of interesting go ahead and exit out of here go ahead Adam my Twitter application alright let's go ahead and talk about some OS 7 business since this is running BlackBerry's OS 7 you got a few things here you've got to go ahead and tap that you've got voice search which is great but I can't see a reason to possibly want to use voice search we've got this ridiculously awesome keyboard in fact I've never even used to play search on here at all in fact let's try using voice search for the first time I'll try searching for TechnoBuffalo so go and hit it I got accepted first you can tell if never use it TechnoBuffalo TechnoBuffalo there it is kind of neat so it works I would never use it because the keyboards awesome and a pleasure to type on but it is there one thing that's kind of weird is that the default search here is actually Bing so let me try typing a search term I like candy which is true I do and boom Bing is the default search engine on here I actually download a Google search application so I could go ahead and hit that kind of odd but you can definitely get yourself around it a quick note and speaking of Google search if you do want to sync your calendar you need to download Google's mobile sync application you can also download Google apps which isn't going to come downloaded on here you got to go to em kugel comm to get all of that information OS seven works very well you've got the icons that look a little bit different the liquid graphics the improved web browsing you've got some integration with bbm and some of the applications here nothing that's worth going to that much detail spice it to say that it does work very well and it's very quick a few things that I didn't want to show on the device that I didn't even know existed and are necessarily part of this review but just very cool little tweaks I see up there I've got my battery indicator it says 80% that has a cool application go ahead right there called six tools that I downloaded I was also a cool application or taking screenshots appropriately called capturing which let you take screenshots of anything anywhere in the device so go ahead and exit out of that case you want to do either of those that's how you would accomplish it all rights go ahead and take a look at some pictures because there's all kinds of fun stuff to talk about here especially in regards to t-touch we'll go ahead and open up that we'll go ahead and take a look at some of the wallpapers here how about that one pinch-to-zoom it is very smooth if you've ever seen pinch to zoom on the torch one or on the storm one or the storm two it's not been a pleasant experience here really just nicely done Rin did an excellent job the pinch to zoom in here and images is just as good as a pinch to zoom on the browser and on other devices so really just did a very very nice job here let's go ahead and jump into blackberry app world this is where I don't have the network turned on app world not many apps in there unfortunately that's really one of the knocks on blackberry you don't have the same app support you get on Android or iOS you have to have to live in a limited experience for apps and figure out what's important to you it will ship with Twitter and Facebook applications which will integrate very nicely into the OS and notification bar right across the top but definitely give a search you can go to your web browser and search for blackberry app world and see what apps are there one of the ones that I really love this application right there called whatsapp sort of a bbm esque replacement it lets you essentially text message folks across platforms across country that having to use really any data-intensive stuff or e-tec messaging plans so I have friends in Canada where would cost mine a text message or friends abroad whatsapp is awesome if you try to download it though from blackberry app world it's gonna tell you it's not available for this device you have to actually go to the whatsapp website and download it that's true with a lot of things on here you got to sort of do workarounds find the applications that you like let's go ahead and talk about battery this thing is being powered by a 1230 milliamp hour battery which is a step down from them they're just just about 1,500 milliamp hour battery that we had in the 97 80 and boy do you know it so I am about 80 percent right now with heavy usage towards end of the day with two accounts being set up about an hour to two hours of phone calls some text messaging in here and searching for updates on Twitter and Facebook I am generally down to about 10% coming into the day around midnight so I wish we had a bigger battery I would have maybe gone for a tad thicker device so I could get through a full day you're going to look for an external battery or have a cord close by if you're going to want to use this device that is a really solid knock on it here the camera you saw a video that I did link will be down below showing the camera footage it looks pretty good for 720p unsurprisingly the audio fidelity was awesome the built-in microphones here on the bold 9900 are really very nice so this is a test of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and presumably the same thing as the 99 30 as well the CDMA variant coming out soon John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo I'll see you the next video overall I've been thrilled with the bold 9900 from a build quality standpoint to a usability standpoint it's a phone that I like to use the phone that I actually enjoy using and that's any Testament this is the phone that's going to live in my pocket not this phone and not any phone running this operating system which is Android this is what I'm going to be carrying with me I know people say oh rim rim is dead why use rim blackberry forever or iPhone forever or Android the way to go a phone os at least for me is a representative of my personality or Who I am I use what's best from at the time I don't have any knock on iOS and I don't have any knock on Android for me and for the email intensive life that I kind of live this thing is actually outstanding and is very very hard to beat I'm from and fantastic keyboard so now a full capable web browser and they gradually I'll be in very slowly growing app catalog I'm encouraged by what rim is done and I'm encouraged by the future that RIM might have they continue this sort of incremental upgrades future might not be so bright but they continue to release phones like the 9900 and hopefully some qnx based phones in your future I think we're a might have a few few legs left in this race so you guys agree disagree this is a phone that you definitely have to look at if you're on any carrier it's coming to every single carrier some are already out really just an outstanding device and this is going to be my daily driver I am John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo and I'll see you in the next video bye bye