gdgt

This is a tough phone to review, a few points to go over before I expand on that:

* This is the best BlackBerry I have ever used
* This is the best keyboard I have ever used
* This is the best battery life I have seen from a touchscreen device
* This phone is 2-3 years too late to impact the general consumer market

It truly pains me to see what is happening to BlackBerry thus far in 2012 but this review is on the BlackBerry Bold 9930 and not on the state of RIM.

This is my second time carrying the phone on a day to day basis, the first time was last fall in which I was very frustrated with how nice the hardware was and how archaic and outdated the software was.

4 months later I am back to using the phone on a day to day and my perspective has changed. I have come to terms with the shortcomings of this phone/OS, I am no longer angry about the lack of netflix and I don't expect to see an updating twitter/foursquare/facebook widget taking up half of my home screen.

No, instead I am now appreciating the positives of what this device excels at, and that is still quite alot. Email is so second nature to BlackBerry that you almost take it for granted until you switch off the OS, it is consistent and on point. The notifications are extremely personalized from the sound it makes, how many times it will vibrate, to the blinking notification light, you are always aware of whats incoming on the phone without ever looking at the screen and that is something RIM should be proud of.

In terms of battery life I have to judge this with 2 categories: overall smartphones and other BlackBerrys. In terms of other smartphones this phone will last most likely twice as long as you are used to, you can be receiving email all day, checking Facebook, refreshing Twitter, listening to audio and 9 times out of 10 you WILL get through an entire day. When comparing to other BlackBerry's of the past this phone actually falls short, in order to accommodate the thinner profile of the phone the battery was what suffered the most, with a 1230mAh battery it is a step down from the previous CDMA Bold and Tour models which housed 1400mAh batteries respectively. With a more dynamic device that has a touch screen and the lower capacity battery those who have stuck with BlackBerry through the years and go to this device will notice the difference immediately.

The camera is rated at 5 megapixels with the ability to record HD video at 720p. The video test I performed saw some consistent chopiness with muffled audio, a back facing mic would have surely helped. The photos are great for daytime shots with objects in frame with no need of zooming in. Why no zooming? In order to keep the body of the phone as slim as possible the exclusion of a zoom was necessary in their eyes and in the end it is our eyes that suffer, only digital zoom at a lower resolution is possible.

The web browser has improved dramatically over previous iterations, no doubt due to the adoption of WebKit. In the specs it claims to be compatible with HTML5 but in my personal experience I would say I have had maybe a 50% success rate with HTML5 video. Flash is not an option, and the YouTube that you will experience is the lower quality mobile site. It's not the stock android browser or mobile safari but I would rate the BlackBerry browser as competent at best.

At the end of the day you will need to determine what it is you want to get out of your smartphone, if the needs are email, text messaging, brief experiences with social networks, and a physical keyboard then this is probably your best option at the moment. BlackBerry has been manufacturing devices for over a decade now and this phone is by far their nicest piece of hardware yet.