Davey Winder
Friday, 08 August 2008 19:10
Your IT -
Mobility
Page 2 of 3
If familiarity does, indeed, breed contempt then anyone
familiar with the iPhone will certainly be contemptuous of the half-VGA
(480x320 resolution at 217 ppi) colour LCD of the BlackBerry Bold. Yet
look beyond the smaller size and lack of multi-touch interfacing, and
you are left with a display that is actually stunning in terms of both
definition and clarity.
But it just isn't as big, and therefore
immediately not as useful in terms of function when it comes online web
usage, as the iPhone 3G. When it comes to the form factor, though, any
objectivity flies out of the window.
It is undeniably a BlackBerry, yet the look and feel is different to
the rest. The chrome finished trim against the polished black casing
and that wonderfully tactile leatherette backplate ensure you know that
as soon as you pick it up.
iPhone 3G users will, no doubt, scoff at the sacrifice of display upon
the alter of the keyboard and argue that a full, multi-touch, screen
with a virtual keyboard is the more aesthetically pleasing solution
while retaining all the functionality.
Having lived with an iPhone for some time, and being in possession of
relatively fat fingers, I beg to differ. It is all too easy to slip up
on the virtual iPhone keyboard and not get rescued by the often
irritating auto-correct system.
The tactile feedback of a proper, albeit shrunken, keyboard makes for
more efficient text input even for the fat fingered amongst us.
Yes, the smaller screen will make for a different web browsing
experience. However, RIM insists that the combination of the
next-generation 624 MHz mobile processor with the trackball driven
browser is the more flexible solution.
Web browsing comes in two configurations, either a standard desktop
style page view with point and click zooming to move around specific
parts of the larger web page, or a quick switchable column view.
The latter presents the page in a continuous column for easier reading
and scrolling, although I am hard pressed to describe this as being 'as
the developer intended' nor even intuitive.
So is the BlackBerry Bold a business phone or not? Can RIM take a bite out of the Apple consumer market? Find out on page 3...
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