Blackberry Bold 9700

The RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700 looks nothing like its predecessor. Gone is the wide, masculine body, and in its place is a more svelte, compact smartphone that should fulfill RIM's hope of attracting both men and women, and consumers and professionals. At 4.29 inches tall by 2.36 inches wide by 0.56 inch thick and 4.3 ounces, the Bold 9700 is certainly more pocketable and is even smaller and lighter than the BlackBerry Tour.

The Bold 9700 has a 2.44-inch display (compared with 2.75 inches) but its 480x360-pixel resolution at 245 pixels per inch certainly keeps things clear and sharp. The user interface is largely unchanged, though BlackBerry OS 5.0 brings some slight refinements.

Below the display, you get the standard BlackBerry controls: Talk and End keys, a menu shortcut, and a back button. However, like the BlackBerry Curve 8520, the Bold 9700 replaces the traditional trackball navigator with an optical trackpad.Just below is the Bold 9700's 35-key full QWERTY keyboard. Though not as spacious as the original Bold's, the large and comfortable buttons are ideal for typing both short text messages and longer e-mails.On the left spine, there's a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microUSB port/power connector, and a customizable shortcut key.

The Bold 9700 has Wi-Fi and UMA (unlicensed mobile access) support, which means you can make and receive unlimited calls over a wireless network without using calling-plan minutes.Other phone features include quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, voice-activated dialing, smart dialing, conference calling, speed dial, visual voice mail, and text and multimedia messaging with threaded chat view. In addition, the Bold 9700 features background noise suppression technology for clearer audio.

The built-in media player supports MP3, WMA, WMA ProPlus, AAC, AAC+, and eAAC+ files, and MPEG4, WMV, and H.264 video clips. There's a search function, playlist creation, shuffle and repeat, and you get a full-screen mode for video playback.

This offers faster JavaScript (now enabled by default) and CSS processing for quicker page loading. In addition, the browser supports BlackBerry widgets and Google Gears as well as the real-time streaming protocol, so you can watch streaming videos from sites like mobile YouTube.