RIM BlackBerry Bold 9900

The latest in riot gear

Camera work

The new BlackBerry 7 OS looks a little different to the previous version, but in truth, not much different. The menu icons are nice and colourful, but still not particularly intuitive, though you can organise them into related menus for convenience. There are none of those lovely widgets that we’ve got used to with Android either.

Look familiar? BlackBerry 7 OS homescreen

The new OS includes NFC (Near Field Communication), helping it to keep up with Android and offering the chance to pay for things using your handset – not that there’s much you can buy in this way yet. BlackBerry Maps is also integrated into the OS, so you can set it to automatically map your position when you’re using the camera, for instance.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the Bold 9900 is its speed. The single-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor backed by 768MB is certainly powerful enough to handle whatever you care to throw at it, and whips between apps at an alarming rate.

Sample Shots

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Taken with flash
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The 5Mp camera includes 4x digital zoom, autofocus, image stabilisation, LED flash, geo-tagging and face detection. It starts up very quickly in about two seconds, and picture quality is generally good, with nice, sharp edges and good colour balance. The 720p HD video recording is a nice extra touch too, and delivers decent quality images. However, there’s no camera on the front for video chat.