The January 12th blog entry, 'BB Bold 9700' , introduced the Bold II. After almost two weeks a few further data points... The size, trackpad, and camera are improvements on the Bold 9000. The smaller size of the 9700 is nicer and does not cause any issues e.g. with ease of keyboard use. After quickly getting used to the trackpad the trackball now feels very uncomfortable and unwieldy when I use the Bold 9000. And the camera is clearly significantly improved.
On the "down" side are browsing speed, the speed of sending e-mails with attachments, and (interestingly) battery life. Browsing seems much slower. I say 'seems' because I have not attempted to benchmark the times in any way, but on every web site I now distinctly have to wait while the browser thermometer bar moves through the 'Requesting,' 'Loading Data [xK of yK],' and 'Loading Images [x of y]' steps. Ugh! Sending e-mails with attachments is slower. Now granted, the images taken with the camera on the Bold 9700 are much larger, but the speed even seems slower than before with smaller images. On the plus side, with the 9700 I do get to see the upload (%) progress, which I did not see on the Bold 9000. Finally, my Bold 9700's batter life is much worse than that of the Bold 9000. Although rated significantly better (6 hour talk time and 17 days standby time versus 4.5 hours talk time and 13.5 days standby time) my Bold's battery only lasts the day with fairly low usage. For example, on December the 20th the battery went from fully charged to needing charging in just twelve hours, with only very moderate usage - data usage, including Twitter, approximately 2 hours of web browsing (not including any sites with video or audio), no multimedia use (e.g. camera, music, etc.), and no phone calls... Hmm, perhaps the battery is defective in some way...
So, what is the bottom line? An incremental improvement, with little reason for a Bold 9000 user to "upgrade."
On the "down" side are browsing speed, the speed of sending e-mails with attachments, and (interestingly) battery life. Browsing seems much slower. I say 'seems' because I have not attempted to benchmark the times in any way, but on every web site I now distinctly have to wait while the browser thermometer bar moves through the 'Requesting,' 'Loading Data [xK of yK],' and 'Loading Images [x of y]' steps. Ugh! Sending e-mails with attachments is slower. Now granted, the images taken with the camera on the Bold 9700 are much larger, but the speed even seems slower than before with smaller images. On the plus side, with the 9700 I do get to see the upload (%) progress, which I did not see on the Bold 9000. Finally, my Bold 9700's batter life is much worse than that of the Bold 9000. Although rated significantly better (6 hour talk time and 17 days standby time versus 4.5 hours talk time and 13.5 days standby time) my Bold's battery only lasts the day with fairly low usage. For example, on December the 20th the battery went from fully charged to needing charging in just twelve hours, with only very moderate usage - data usage, including Twitter, approximately 2 hours of web browsing (not including any sites with video or audio), no multimedia use (e.g. camera, music, etc.), and no phone calls... Hmm, perhaps the battery is defective in some way...
So, what is the bottom line? An incremental improvement, with little reason for a Bold 9000 user to "upgrade."
what about GPS? have you noticed any drop of quality in the 9700 vs 9000?
ReplyDeleteAhmad,
ReplyDeleteI haven't really used this much yet, other than via Beyond 411 integration, so I don't really have a basis to make a comparison yet. At some future point I will have some idea and will post then...