Blackberry Bold Touch 9900

The BlackBerry Bold Touch is the CDMA version of the CDMA BlackBerry Bold Touch 9930. The difference consist in the $299.99 price on contract and the support for T-Mobile's HSPA + network.

The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 is one of the best looking smartphones built by Blackberry. It's a lot more sleek, attractive and better built than most other BlackBerry devices. It measures 115 x 66 x 10.5 mm and weighs 130 grams. The front of the device holds a 2.8 TFT touchscreen display with VGA resolution(640*480) and 28ppi. Under the display you can find the great full QWERTY keyboard that is one of the best keyboards yet. It has a spacious layout, keys are big enough and the responsiveness is simply great and the lack of an on-screen keyboard(despite having a touchscreen) means you will end up using it all the time..

On the left side we see the 3.5 mm jack and microUSB port while the right side holds the volume rocker and dedicated camera key. The top only holds the power key. On the back we find the 5MPx with LED flash and the battery cover. Remove it and you will find the 1230 mAh battery( that gives the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 up to 307 hours of stand-by and over 6 hours of talk time), SIM card slot and microSD card slot.

The BlackBerry Bold touch is powered by a 1.2 GHz single core CPU and 768 MB of RAM. It's not much if you compare it with the monster dual core droids but it's more than any previous Bold device had. It also runs BlackBerry OS 7 which is responsive, fast and fluid thanks to the Liquid Graphics technology. But unfortunately it still looks chunky and a bit outdated.

In terms of software the BlackBerry Bold Touch offers the same great E-mail experience but still lacks the threaded conversations, Calendar which allows sync with Gmail and Facebook accounts(color coded), Clock app with alarms,stopwatch and timer, Calculator,Voice Notes, Tasks and MemoPad.

In terms of multimedia the 5MPx camera is a bit of a disappointment since it lacks auto-focus. Pictures tend to lack fine details and be over-exposed. Low light shots are even worse since the noise levels are very high. The 720p@30fps video recording on the other hand is pretty smooth and sounds great.

The music player has a coverflow like interface when browsing the songs. It has all the standard options and audio quality is good. Video playback is also nice and smooth. The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 can play DivX files with 1280*720 resolution easily thanks to it's speedy CPU and great display.

In terms of connectivity you get quad-band GSM support,tri-band 3G with HSPA support, Wi-Fi, GPS with A-GPS, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and the ability to work in any country. Web browsing is very fast and smooth thanks to the HSPA+ support and the great OS 7 browser. Even very complex pages load in a very short time.

Calling quality is good, voices sound pretty clear and crisp but there is a hint of static in the background. Unfortunately the Bold Touch 9900 doesn't offer Wi-Fi calling. Signal strength is also good.

Overall the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 is a great device, one of the best BlackBerry smartphone and gives you a great set of features in a premium looking shell. The only problem is the $299.99 price tag which is more that the price for the dual core droids.