WEB SURFING WITH THE BLACKBERRY BOLD 9700

Bold 9700 Internet Browser

There’s no mistaking that the Bold 9700 is one of the best designed cellphones to come out of BlackBerry’s production line. Equipped with a newer and slimmer design factor, the lack of inches is more than made up by improvements in areas such as a better designed keyboard, elimination of the ungainly trackball, longer battery life and 3G network services.

Access to 3G internet services is definitely one advantage the Bold has over Apple’s iPhone even after its 2.1 upgrade. Tests done on the Bold and iPhone showed steadier 3G connections on the BlackBerry device compared to the iPhone which sometimes dropped to EDGE networks. In terms of connectivity, the Bold 9700 certainly comes on top of the iPhone.

Using 3G services on our cellphones requires a lot of juice on our battery’s life. One problem that continues to plague iPhone users is the seemingly lack of staying power on their devices. With an improved battery design the Bold 9700 was able to deliver longer 3G connectivity compared to shorter hours over the iPhone.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 currently uses two separate browsers, one for WiFi (hotspot) and another for its 3G internet browser. Automatic identification of network connection is not supported and users have to manually configure connections.

However, many problems concerning internet connectivity plague the BlackBerry Bold. The internet browser was not as smooth as the iPhone’s Safari browser. Installing a different browser to optimize surfing experience with the BlackBerry Bold is possible but is cumbersome as it does not provide a default setting for the installed browser. Even when the Bold was operating over the speedier 3G services, it showed its flaws in terms of smoothness even when the iPhone was operating on the slower EDGE connection.

Web surfing over the BlackBerry Bold 9700 was far from perfect but the handset showed significant improvements over its siblings. It uses a much friendlier interface similar to the Firefox browser. This made browsing over web pages much smoother but still presented problems in or out of the page. Focusing in and out of web pages required some navigating with a click to zoom in and pressing the alt key and clicking to zoom out.

Viewing pages using Javascript could be tricky with the Bold 9700’s browser. Problems with downtimes and loading times were noticed as pages were slow to populate. Developers at RIM and blackberry may have seen these shortcomings and their recent purchase of Torch Mobile, creators of Webkit browsers signal their intention of stepping up in this department. There were also instances when we got a little bit frustrated when sites just took a little bit too long to load or just simply froze. These were noticed on both Wifi and 3G connections which came as a bit of a surprise for us.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 has its own share of some quirks that certainly needs to be ironed out. Problems with connectivity surfaced when neither the hotspot or internet browser worked. The phone’s browser tried to access the webpage but after waiting for a couple of seconds it returned white pages. I wasn’t able to access any of the phones function and seemingly the phone froze on me. The only solution I could think of was to restart the phone by removing the battery to forcefully put the cellphone out of its misery. Luckily during the remainder of the tests the problem never occurred again but made us wonder if this was a onetime affair or a glitch with the cellphone.

The web surfing experience with the Bold 9700 showed major improvements over earlier BlackBerry models. Although it didn’t go as smoothly compared with other smartphones such as the iPhone, it does have its strong points in terms of better 3G connectivity and a longer battery life.