Boy Genius has landed a
BlackBerry Bold -- RIM's big, splashy push into the brave new world of HSDPA -- in production hardware trim, and it looks like the rougher users out there might need a quick lesson in fragile handling if they want to get in on the action when it launches around the world in the next few weeks. The screen is said to be absolutely beautiful (as it should be at 480 x 320), and there's a much improved browser to take advantage of that extra real estate; unfortunately, the whole package apparently scratches up with ridiculous ease, so it's anybody's guess just how long you'll be able to actually see the screen before it's awash in damage. Just remember: keys in one pocket, BlackBerry in the other. Interested parties would do themselves a favor by clicking through to the full review -- the cat knows his BlackBerrys, and he's really gone to town this time around.
posted Jul 15th 2008 11:38AM
Or you can buy a screen protector and a case for it.
Please, stop with the common sense.
Wait, so when the iPhone was announced, all the haters could talk about was its sure-to-be-scratchable screen. It later proved to be nearly impervious to scratches. But Blackberry comes out with a device with a mar-ready screen and all you have to say is "get a screen protector?" Seriously???
The astroturfing on this site is reaching epic proportions
Vote me down, Apple haters and RIM shills!
I guess they took more than one cue from Apple products: it has a beautiful, glossy, black and chrome style body (like the iPhone, though I think it actually looks better than the iPhone), and scratches easily (apparently) like the iPod Nano (although having spent some time with a couple 3rd gen. iPod Nanos, I highly doubt it gets that "used" look as quickly as Apple's fingerprint/scratch magnet).
Oh please. Get over your iObsession. I enjoy my Apple products, yes, but to call any device with chrome and black an iClone is just nonsensical. If it had an Apple somewhere on it, then maybe it'd be a clone. The original Model-T was black, therefore all black cars are Model-T clones!!
Read link is dead :(
STFU!
Meh. I was going to tell you to F off, but you're just an Apple fanboy and troll.
yea can't get on either
All BlackBerry devices can copy and paste.... just saying...
Candidate for my most likely next phone to replace my BB 8800
yeah bgr sucks ... half the time it doesnt work
@Kris
All computers copy and paste, whats your point?
That sucks it scratches easily. It looks pretty nice
Thats just a soft fix.
A Bold will never have a touchscreen. Just saying...
BGR does suck. It's hilarious when the guy publicly posts rants going after Giz though. He titles posts such as, "You don't want it with the kid," or "the champ is here." I think he listens to too much Jadakiss. He reminds me of like a high-school lunch argument the way he fights over the internet with other blogs about release dates and he said, she said. Blackberry is dying a slow death, fall stock price, fall!!!
Agreed. The last two rants caused me to replace BGR with Giz in my daily blog reading. His wannabe hip-hop self is just sad. 'Course, now that I wrote this, I'm going to have to watch my back so I don't get "capped."
Blackberry makes some pretty kickass products...I don't see them going extinct anytime soon. Perhaps you've never actually experienced a business environment? In the vast majority of workplaces, the Blackberry reigns supreme.
Sorry BGR doesn't cover Apple like you need it to.
hold on, who puts blackberry in pocket with keys? don't we put them in holders hanging down the belt?
Suit pants pockets are kind of tight. Don't they keep their keys in their man-purses?
You mean "mini-briefcase."
i mean something like this...
http://www.ascenddistribution.com/shareimage/CBLA8800LC01_4.jpg
i don't really know how to call it.
Holsters. They are called holsters, and they are quite useful when you don't have enough pockets but need to carry your cell phone around. Although, you will look like a douche.
Ok why can't I get on BoyG? what's up with the site?
the site is still dead....grrr
the point is... iPhone's can't, and because of that, they are extremely hobbles, especially for serious business emailing uses.
I-- what?
Hope RIM has got the Bold right as it will be put up against the hype king of 3G devices. Looks evolutionary to me and that may not be enough :-(
sorry, hobbleD
My brother has had a Bold for months now *cough RIM employee* and scratching has not been an issue at all. I don't know where your source is getting this from. One occurrence of being careless?
EPIC FAIL! I really just wanted to say that. You BB zealots do it all the time on the iphone posts, even when the claim couldn't be further from the truth (at least not according to Apple's rapid market growth and total sales). I hope the new BBs kick some ass so Apple will be forced to do what we all both sides -- the dark one and the stupid one -- know they are fully capable of doing, namely, making a kick ass device that rocks all handsets the world over (and that has copy and paste, video, sling mobile, voice activated turn-by-turn gps, and document creation, of course).
P.S. I challenge any of you BB fanatics to a speed typing duel! You will fail, epically.....
Want to make it interesting? Let's do it one-handed and blindfolded (to simulate the experience of driving a car and replying to an email). You will die epically. Or sadly.
How old are you....14?
Square, way to think for yourself there kiddo.
Wouldn't you know, an absolutely absurd, albeit comical, comment by Bg gets highly ranked. This despite the fact that his (or her) argument boils down to one of "I can text faster on a bb than you can on an iphone were we were to do so while driving and taking our eyes completely off the road!" Best of all, a sheer majority of smartphone users spend a sheer majority of their time not texting while they drive. After all, they're smarter than you numbskulls. Thus, if that's the best Bg and the rest of you Crackberry folks can muster - an argument at the extremely irrelevant- you've failed, EPICALLY!!!!
I'm home alone alright. In my nice new york city apartment, waiting for my cushy Big Law firm job to start in the Fall. Without doing all the math for you, that makes me just a tad older than 14. Not that that even matters, seeing as many 14 year olds are, from the looks of things, smarter and more informed about the topic at hand than you are. As I said in my earlier post, bring on the cut and past, if only to shut you bb drones up already. I say take away all of those straws that you and your fellow dimwits keep pulling at, and watch in glee bb addicts scramble to justify owning a sub sub par device. Banter amongst yourselves - im out.
I hope your lawyer skills are better than your "re-typing two letters without transposing them" skills (its gb not bg you knucklehead). Must be typing on an iPhone again :)
gb,
Try a comma or at the least a semi-colon at the end of your first post and then come talk to me.
HAH
No way in hell you are a lawyer. Is that seriously the first job that came to your mind when trying to make yourself sound smart?
I am not a lawyer, but I work with a lot of them. And none of them have an iPhone. I don't know if that will change now with Exchange and 3G... but I highly doubt it since BB and Samsung are so dominant in the business world.
Nice try. Next time say you are a mechanical engineer or something. Then people will excuse your shit typing skills and think you know what you are talking about. But a cushy New York "Big Law" firm lawyer? ROFL. What do you do? sort their mail?
Cheap plastic chrome.. LOL.. Cheap plastic screen. Unlike the iPhone screen which is made with a micro dusting of diamond dust on optical quality glass. 480x360 on such a small screen with really ugly 80's style icon must look really cool I guess.
Hey newf*g... stfu. These are two different markets. I would love to see a CEO trying to get work done with an iPhone. Heh. (*presses backspace 25 times*) maybe they'll have one for personal use but it won't cut if for work. Touch screen soft keys = hobby, real keys = work. However..... iPhone-esque hardware + slide out keyboard + android OS = secks?
"We can safely say that this is the best screen we’ve ever seen on a mobile device. Hands down." --From BGR
iPhone lovers, eat your collective hearts out!
@gad get
Yes, from now on, I think the motion picture industry must comply to the highest quality standard in optical technology. All optical lens producers and the industry in general needs to switch to cheap easy to scratch plastics for all their optics. According to you and that reviewer, clear cheap plastic, has better quality than diamond enforced optical quality lenses. Next up analog FM is the wave of the future. I really hope that feature is shipping immediately with this cheap plastic device.
@ Jubei
Can you seriously state that having spent your good money on an expensive little smartphone, you're just gonna hope the screen's tough enough to avoid scratches on its own? I don't think so-- unless it's the iPhone, which you would prefer not to cover the screen of, since it hopefully won't need it, and because if you did, it would probably make the touch screen less responsive. So you might as well not be spending the extra money for a fancy, super durable (NOT invincible) screen, and just spend a dollar or two on a cheap piece of sticky-backed durable plastic (which can be easily and cheaply replaced if damaged) that achieves the same thing... or do you think theyd be kind enough not to charge you for a diamond micro-particle encrusted screen?
@gad
"I don't think so-- unless it's the iPhone, which you would prefer not to cover the screen of, since it hopefully won't need it, and because if you did, it would probably make the touch screen less responsive."
This your biggest mistake. Making assumptions about a product in which you have no clue whatsoever on its performance. Its really easy to not make a fool of oneself. Simply avoid stating things that you believe is fact in your own mind. If you stop doing that, you won't be looked upon as the court jester in this little world of ours. Read your quote above again and think about it. Try to understand why such a statement from you is so funny, one has to shake their head in disbelief that you actually believe its true.
Good stuff, but didn't see alot on multimedia unless I missed it. I want a BOLD or Thunder, don't know which.
Why don't they make a glass screen?
are f'n kidding me
Thanks to 1500mAh battery and a crap load of engineering on RIM’s part, they’ve finally got it nailed down. 300-500 emails a day, one hour of web surfing over 3G, Wi-Fi usually turned on, Bluetooth turned off, JiveTalk connected, and around one hour of phone calling (we don’t really use the BlackBerry as a phone)
that's considered good battery life? RIM is done. they'll survive a bit longer because they're entrenched in enterprise, but they're going to find it increasingly tough to compete with apple. RIM was a fantastic little e-mail device that glommed on average phone features. as they continue to try and compete with mobile computing space they're going to fall further and further behind.
at some point they will realize they can't compete with an OS that's doing things it was never designed to do and will pull a palm. they'll license an OS or try to build one in-house, but it will be a lot harder than their engineers tell management. there will be massive compatibility issues and delays that make vista look timely. their market share will shrink as smart phones replace regular phones in the consumer space, investors will bail, profits will fall, they will start to lose engineers and upper management.
eventually microsoft will purchase them after their sidekick-based initiative fails in yet another attempt to make a viable windows based phone OS. blackberry will then twist in the wind for a few more years, get re-branded, get moved to a new re-organized mobile division of microsoft, get relegated to a bastard-branch, have the engineers from that team absorbed in to the next mobile attempt and have all blackberry related issues moved to a small team of india-based support staff to handle the few remaining corporate customers.
you're such a moron. go back to worshiping your apple shrine.
That sort of use will kill any cell phone. Try another rant.
Investors will BEGIN to bail? Since they announced the BOLD was delayed from the RUMORED late June release date the share price has fallen 50+ points. Blackberry is dying a very slow, very painful death. Die BB Die!!!
That's what investors/analysts been saying about RIM for the last few years. Not going to happen, RIM keeps growing and growing...
You must be a little kid who has never actually experienced the work place. Go intern at an office and then tell me Blackberries suck. I know many people who are ATT users who specifically chose the Blackberry Curve over the iPhone, and made the right choice.
The iPhone is media-centric whereas Blackberries are productivity-centric. It's as simple as that.
Is it wrong to call a phone sexy?
Here we go again with the BlackBerry vs. iPhone rants again...
I love Apple's products (regardless of price, if you can afford it, you can afford it, it's that simple) so I guess you can consider me an Apple fanboy. It never occurred to me why others outside of the "Apple Cult" speak badly of those in the "Apple Cult" until the iPhone 3G news broke out.
It's not because Apple fanboys love Apple products and like to show it, it's the stupid ass comments they make.
The iPhone is a awesome device. A device that has rich media functions that runs a stable OS and let's be real, a device that "wow's" people when pulled out.
Apple fans are only in it for the present. How can you s--t talk a device (BlackBerry) when it still beats you in market share with the simple, boring and often ugly GUI? How can you talk down on a device when even after 2 generations of iPhone's, the BlackBerry is still managing to outsell the iPhone almost 3 to 1?
You can say that the large number of BlackBerry users originated when RIM was probably the only solution to e-mail's and when Windows Mobile failed to compete, which is true, but even when Smartphones became the "cool" thing to have and when Apple totally blew out the public with the introduction of the iPhone, RIM's growth grew to over 600 percent over the past few years. Simply put, RIM isn't entering Apple's market, Apple is entering RIM's market and no matter what Apple seems to throw at RIM/BlackBerry, they just continue to rise while Apple seems to rise and then fall back down.
Sure on the surface the iPhone might look like it's doing serious damage but look deep at the numbers, they tell a different story.
Would I buy an iPhone? Sure why not? It's a great device but don't confuse yourself by putting in up against a BlackBerry. I don't understand how by adding Exchange support is suppose to compete with a business handset. Apple claims that it is suitable but they're not doing a good job promoting it as one. How are you going to attract IT departments to use the iPhone if 24/7 you're talking about Games, the accelerometer and the cool graphic the phone has? You think IT departments care about all that stuff?
As far as I'm concerned, RIM doesn't even need to come out with an iPhone killer because even with their BASIC handsets (compared to what the iPhone can do) it has not affected what RIM has done. If anything, if you consider who owns how much of the market (the only thing that matters to a business) then Apple NEEDS to come out with a BlackBerry killer because according to the really biased Apple fanboys out there, the iPhone which is suppose to end all phones has done NOTHING to RIM.
(Still don't think you can compare the two until Apple actually shows they're committed to actually catering to the business by adding more tools that would be useful instead of just adding Exchange and saying it's a business phone...)
"Here we go again with the BlackBerry vs. iPhone rants again..."
I'm sorry, what was your post about again?
There are more consumers than there are business executives. lol.
Sounds to me like the PS3 vs. Wii, claiming the Wii is niche market console.
There's just way too much hate here. RIM has always aimed to satisfy mid-large enterprise customers. Until recently, they have been unchecked in the market I'm surprised that they still manage to innovate. Mobile enthusiasts should be _happy_ that Apple is trying to woo business users as it will mean real competition. Once RIM realizes that they are at risk of losing their customer base, they will have to innovate even more. Their hardware is pretty good (except the battery life... 1 hour of 3G? Get real) but their software could use some work. Welcome the chance for innovation and stop being such fanboys.
Way to spam the news article with your iPhone shit.
Stupid ass fanboy.
Oh,and Ipods/Iphones *NEVER* scratch do they?
Mine never has. Both of my iPhones (1st gen and 3G) have had a crystal anti-glare film on the front, and plastic case on the back from day one(s.) A device will scratch if you careless, any device you carry around naked (the device being naked, not yourself) will scratch, end of story.
i will not buy this blackberry. it is scratched.
Nice looking gadget. If you're into that kind of thing, and if you really, really, really need to be working from your phone 10 hrs/day (which makes me think you have little to no life since you probably spend another 8-10 in front of your pc's). I have absolutely no hate for BB's.... in fact? I LOVE THEM.
I don't understand why people who like one product want to convince the rest of the world about it. I personally would never own a BlackBerry. There. I love the fact that people who work 20hrs/day want one, and that some of them drive around answering e-mails one-handed (Darwin Award just waiting to happen!).
Capitalism is awesome. Different products, different needs, different people. I DON'T want everyone in the world to have an iPhone, or an iPod, or a Mac.. for that matter. I love the fact that a lot of people hate them... if you cannot see the benefit/value in these products, then THEY ARE NOT FOR YOU!! In fact... DON'T BUY AN iPHONE. Please.
Think about this: Without sub-standard things in the world, how would one learn to appreciate the finer things in life? We need these things!
Live and let live.
You guys got the screen resolution wrong. It's 480x320, not 480x360. HVGA.
Blackberry sucks :D
Old tech+hard to use =FAIL! :)
Come back when you know what you're talking about, "Erik."
poor poor bb fanboy. Open your ears now and listen when I tell you to go back to the 90's, back to when bb's were up to date. By gf has one... Ugh. Horrible to use.
It's 2008, get an iPhone
You do know that this has a sharper screen, better antenna, and superior keyboard than the iPhone, right?
I am typing this on a Macbook, my sister uses a Powerbook, and I set up my parents' 24" iMac yesterday. However, for what I do, a Blackberry makes more sense than the iPhone, and I'd get a Curve OR Bold over an iPhone in a second.
Examine the Kool-Aid ye drink.
Scratchy Scratchy is definitely not good in a business environment.
Common crackberry - stop messing up