BlackBerry 9930 Blackberry Bold Touch 9930 Verizon CDMA GSM Unlocked Phone with Touch Screen, 5MP Camera and Blackberry OS 7 – Unlocked Phone – No Warranty – Black

Defining the word “Quality”, September 4, 2011

By 

E. Byer – See all my reviews

  

I’ve been through hell and back with phones, so forgive me for being pessimistic when I’m standing in the Verizon store wondering what’s wrong with each phone they had. I was ADAMANT that my next phone was going to be the iPhone5 because everyone has jump ship to buy one of these, and quite frankly I love how smooth and responsive my iPod Touch 4g is. Well to backtrack, I have suffered through the BB 8320, BB 8330, BB Tour….got fed up with how underpowered and outdated they were with TONS of lockups and LONG resets, went to G1, DroidX, Fascinate….got fed up with just soooo many glitches in Android phones I can’t believe anybody actually believes they like them…and believe me….as hesitant as I was…I purchased the Blackberry Bold 9930. Why? Why not the iPhone5? For the following reasons:

1. IT HAS AN INDICATOR LIGHT! This technology is so dated that it’s CRIMINAL not to include one on every phone manufactured. If you are like me who is always in quiet environments and can’t have ringtones or chimes going off all the time, then this is extremely valuable to you. With the samsung fascinate I felt I had ADHD constantly checking the damn thing and actually used more battery turning the phone screen on and off. Also BB has the best notification lights on their products hands down! DroidX had one but it wasn’t very visible. Love BB for this!

2. The BEST…and I mean this….THE BEST BB Keyboard I have every used! It’s soft to the touch, easy to press, extremely responsive, keeps up with you, and is wide enough for my big fat fingers. BB…if you ever touch this keyboard and change it I will personally come to your headquarters and slap the CEO. This is the best one ever! I am so SICK and TIRED of these virtual keyboards I can spit. I have more errors than I or the device can count, and I spend MORE time correcting one word than typing a new word.

3. The screen. This is where I think people need to wake up and truly assess the screen size. It’s absolutely stunning. It looks better than a retina display imho, it’s 2.8″ but not just that…it’s touchscreen….something that I begged and pleaded from BB for as long as I can remember (I think the G1). Now I can just tap on the icons and simply tap on whatever I choose without a mouse cursor. Also I thank you BB from the bottom of my heart for keeping the touchpad because you are the ONLY company that I can actually scroll into the middle of a word and delete and replace letters. I can’t stand those stupid touchscreen-only devices when you are typing a text message or web address and you miss a letter and you keep pushing with your index finger trying to get the cursor wedged between two small letters on a small screen. NEVER AGAIN. Also people argue “well you can blow up pictures bigger and view web pages longer.” Very true. But in portrait view, the BB now offers the SAME width as all the other phones…go ahead and compare. Sure you get some more real estate in Landscape…but to me it’s still a 3.5 – 4″ screen and I wouldn’t trade a BB keyboard for anything in the world!

4. FAST. I MEAN…FAST. This thing keeps up with every button I press and every icon I tap.

5. Battery life is good. Honestly I’m not jumping out of my seat saying “I can’t believe how long this lasts.” It does last a long time (I’d say about 6-10 hrs depending on real usage) but no better nor worse than the competitors. Gotta power that gorgeous display somehow right .

6. 5mp Camera is nice. The flash is great to have, but the pictures aren’t as natural as a real camera flash. I’m being picky, but I tell it like it is. I really don’t know what the iPhone camera flash is like, but I do know the pictures are crisp and clear on that phone. These pics seem great to me as well, but I have yet to send one to someone to see how it looks on their phone.

7. Design: Quite frankly I don’t know what everyone is bickering about on the blogs, but apparently this Bold “look” has been replayed for a couple of years now. What I say to that is: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It’s the most popular selling BB phone RIM sells next to the AT&T Torch, it looks gorgeous to me (I love the metal all around the sides and the carbon fiber look to the back cover), so they could sell me the same looking phone in 6 yrs and I’d still buy it. How many times do you watch your favorite movie over and over again knowing it won’t change when you watch it? What about the iPhone? Black front, shiny back every time…still looks gorgeous (can’t fault them for that).

8. Speaker, speaker, mic, and vibration: You have to hear it to believe it. The speaker on this phone is very loud and clear up to 85% volume (I notice more distortion past that). I dare you right now to go find a speaker that beats this…go ahead…I will wait. I have had one too many phones in my day and this one is the loudest and “clearest” relatively…

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Step in the right direction for RIM…., August 31, 2011

By 

Quentin Gerlach “IT Guy” (Trenton, NJ USA) – See all my reviews

  

I feel for you Verizon customers who have been waiting to upgrade your Blackberries – especially if you wanted a touchscreen BB. Since RIM never released the Torch 9800 for CDMA users, you guys never got to experience that goodness. Surprising since the Torch is (was now, with the release of the Torch 2 and the new 9850 for Verizon) one of the few decent releases from RIM in the past couple of years. Anywho – with the 9930 Bold, those who were left out finally have a reason to upgrade their phones.

For those of you who are wondering – this is NOT the Monaco phone that RIM plans on releasing soon. That phone is fully touchscreen – designed to replace the much hated Storm and not too much better Storm 2.

Ok, so some list of changes that RIM brought about:

- With the release of this Bold, RIM decided to nicely go back to the old style Bold 9000 keyboard. The keys are a bit bigger, so for those of you whose fingers might have been too big for the Bold 2 that was released for Verizon, I urge you to give this phone’s keyboard a try – you’ll be pleased. Some of you may notice the dimensions of the 9930 and the 9700 are very close, so you might wonder how they got the keyboard bigger. Well, they did it by getting rid of the plastic lining around the sides of the phone. Yes – both the keyboard and screen are now flush with the edge of the phone. I’m not sure I’m a fan of this, as it makes it a whole lot easier to crack/break something important, but it seems to be a direction most phone manufacturers are moving in, so we’ll see….

- This phone is the first to have the new 7 OS – which is nice, but I think I’d rather have the QNX OS, thank you very much… Haha – but it is a good OS – for those who are interested, it takes up less space than 6. If my calculations are correct – about 15% less. This OS also supports NFC (near-field communication), so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of apps developers create to take advantage of it. (For those who remember it – NFC is how Google Wallet works) Voice search also works particularly well with this OS, and two new business apps are included, called BlackBerry Protect and Balance. Protect allows your business to remotely monitor, configure and wipe, if necessary, a remote smartphone so when the phone disappears, your whole business life doesn’t disappear along with it. And Balance separates business tasks from personal stuff on a BlackBerry, which helps avoid the possibility of confidential data accidentally being sent to all those shady contacts…..

- Yes, the screen is touch capable. It’s actually pretty slick – especially considering how small the screen is, comparatively speaking, so it is usable in day to day operations. It especially works well with the browser – for all those times you need to move the page around, or zoom in on something, or zoom out to get a better view of the entire page. Are you going to play games with it?? Most likely not. But it is a start.

- “Liquid Graphics Technology”: there’s been alot of talk about this, and what exactly does RIM mean by it. Here’s what I can tell you, from my research and usage of the phone: RIM basically put a separate graphics processor into the phone, which means that any of the graphics stuff should be a whole lot smoother and cleaner, since there’s a distinct chip handling all of it. From what I’ve seen, it is pretty fluid, but it still does get hung up at times – especially when it comes to certain web pages. But overall, definitely an improvement. I heard it’s also designed to support 3D animations and games…

Alright – enough of that. Time for the good stuff – is it worth it??

Short answer – absolutely.

Pros:

1) Battery life rocks. I feel for all of you iPhone and Android users whose phones die in like a day. This phone still keeps kicking after 2 days – without plugging it in once. Add to that the ability to actually change your battery, and that I tend to carry a spare just in case, and I can go practically a week without having to charge my phone. Incredible….

2) Faster processor. Thank you RIM, for finally adopting a processor that breaks the 1 GHz marker in a phone! Actually RIM upgraded a bunch of hardware – like the memory, along with the ability to do NFC communications. Thank you for reaching the 21st century RIM – we’re happy to have you!

3) Global phone – this phone supports both the GSM and CDMA networks, so it can be used internationally – a big plus for our corporate employees. If you happen to travel internationally alot – don’t worry, this phone’s got you covered.

4) Hotspot capable – this phone I believe is the first BB to natively support hotspots. Yes, there are apps you can download for the other phones, but you usually have to pay a decent amount (the cheapest I can remember is around 35 – 40…

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Great features but beware serious quality control issue, October 2, 2011

By 

Stephen M. Charme (central New Jersey) – See all my reviews

  

  

  

  

I purchased a Bold 9930 from the Verizon store near my office about ten days ago. During the following week all my phone calls were only a couple of minutes. Then a week after I had purchased the phone I tried to make a longer phone call in an area with five bars (i.e. full signal strength). Not only did the call drop after about three minutes, but the radio was shut off, so that in order to call again I had to turn the mobile network back on, and again the call was dropped and the radio was turned off. To make a long story short, that morning I made dozens of test calls to family members, all with the same results. Doing *228 send and battery pulls had no effect.

I then went that same day to a Verizon store near my home, and upon hearing what happened they gave me a replacement phone. Guess what–exact same problem. I then had multiple phone conversations with Verizon Tech Support Level 2 (the highest level) to check various settings on the phone, and to rule out any local network issues. The conclusion was that there was a software glitch in the new OS 7 system, especially since I had the exact same problem on two separate phones from two separate stores (i.e. the phones were not from the same batch).

Much as I love the features on the phone, I had to return it because I simply could not make phone calls longer than a few minutes on it. Based on the other positive reviews, it appears that this is a quality control issue (not surprising because Verizon said this phone has only been out about a month on the Verizon network). Just make sure that you buy this phone from a seller who will take it back. Verizon has a no questions asked 14 day return policy, and because of the software glitch, waived the thirty-five dollar restocking fee for me.

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