RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700

With every smartphone manufacturer under the sun scrambling to produce touchscreen devices it's almost shocking to see a smartphone arrive without one. Along with a decent hardware keyboard, however, that's precisely what most BlackBerry devotees demand, and in the Bold 9700 that's exactly what RIM has delivered.

In line with previousBold and Curve handsets, the Bold is non-touchscreen. It boasts a hardware Qwerty keyboard that stretches the full width of the 60.5mm-wide chassis and curves gently along its length. As with the original Bold, the keys are all subtly shaped, sloping up to a point, which makes them easier to type on. And the rows of keys still have those attractive silver "frets" between them to space them out a little.

The major changes that RIM has made to the Bold are to its size and to the navigation control. The first is a potential stumbling block, for where the original measured a broad 66mm, the 9700 is half a centimetre narrower. On the plus side, this makes the phone feel much more pocketable than its porky forebear, and it looks nicer too: there's lots of chrome trim to complement the smart black plastic and the leatherette on the rear is a more subtle touch than on the first Bold.

Amazingly, in the slimming down process, the keyboard hasn't lost too much. The keys still feel solid and responsive, and we were able to get up a decent turn of speed too. It's very good for its size and far better than the keyboards on Nokia's E71 or E75, but there's no getting past those narrower dimensions. We were never quite as comfortable typing on it as we were with the original Bold.

We had no such reservation with the next big change - RIM's replacement of the Bold's clickable trackball with a touch-sensitive thumbpad. This sounds fiddly, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sweeping your digit across its surface to control the cursor feels absolutely natural and, as it has a flat surface, it's a lot easier to click than the old trackball. The BlackBerry browser may still not be up to the quality of Android's or Mobile Safari, but this change makes it a lot easier to control than before.

Contributing to the responsive feel is the Bold's incredibly fast performance. Nipping around from application to application, email to instant messenger, and web browser to contact list instigates barely a pause.

Even firing up the camera takes only a second or two. And that camera is half decent too - it will never match a proper digital compact, but with autofocus, an LED light, image stabilisation and 3.2-megapixel resolution, it's perfectly good for snaps.

The screen is good for viewing them too. Measuring 2.44in across it may be 0.16in smaller than its predecessor's but it boasts more pixels. The resolution of 480 x 360 is high enough to be able to read text at tiny point sizes and it's just as colourful and bright as the original Bold's. An ambient light sensor makes sure it doesn't suck up too much power from the 1,500mAh lithium ion battery when it's not needed.

Elsewhere a proximity sensor, GPS with A-GPS support, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and a 3.5mm headphone socket complete an impressive feature set. The only thing missing is a digital compass, which increasing numbers of phones seem to be sporting these days.
And despite the all-singing, all-dancing nature of the phone, we were pleased with its battery life. While a couple of hours of simple web browsing will kill many a modern handset stone dead, the Bold just keeps on running. In our tests, we found the battery life to be significantly better than the HTC Touch2, with 70 percent capacity remaining (to the Touch2's 60 percent) after a day of tough testing. That's on a par with the best smartphones around, and the most impressive bit is that this is with push email turned on – you can't switch it off on a BlackBerry. We test other handsets with push turned off as push tends to drain the battery rather quickly.

The main area of contention, apart from the browser, is BlackBerry App World's range of apps, which isn't as good as the iPhone's huge repertoire nor Android's burgeoning library of widgets and tools, most of which are free. But the Bold counters with email collation and delivery that other smartphones simply can't match, and the fact that Gmail contact synchronisation has recently been added to BIS should increase its consumer appeal.

Add good battery life, a lovely screen, excellent build quality and a no-stone-unturned feature set, and you have one excellent smartphone. Better still, over 18 months you'll pay considerably less for one of these than you will for an iPhone 3GS. Not everyone will be swayed by its non-touchscreen display, but we have to admit to really liking the BlackBerry Bold 9700.

Price when reviewed: £339 (£390 inc VAT)