BlackBerry Aims to Stay Step Ahead

Boy, oh boy. The bunch who brought you the BlackBerry sure has been a band of busy beavers.

Blackberry Bold

With do-everything wonderphones like the iPhone and the G1 “Google phone” breathing down its neck, the BlackBerry’s status as the best-selling smartphone isn’t guaranteed forever. So this fall, Research In Motion is introducing three radically different BlackBerry models, running all of them up the flagpole at once to see who salutes.

First, there’s the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 ($150 with a two-year T-Mobile contract), the first folding clamshell BlackBerry. Second, there’s the BlackBerry Bold 9000 ($300 with a two-year AT&T contract), a luxury-tinged design statement that screams, “Apple isn’t the only one who can do gorgeous!” Finally, there’s the BlackBerry Storm (coming soon from Verizon ), the first BlackBerry with a touch screen.

That last phone isn’t ready for review yet; evidently, that Storm is still brewing. But the Flip and the Bold are here — and they’re very, very nice indeed.

Both phones feature new software, loaded with useful programs (like a slick Clock/Stopwatch app) and white line-drawing icons against a jet-black background. As on the BlackBerry Pearl and the Curve, you navigate by turning a tiny, clickable trackball.

As usual, the strength of these BlackBerrys is e-mail, either individual or corporate. The new software offers fully formatted e-mail — fonts, bold, italic and so on — and pictures embedded right in the message. Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments open right up, ready for simple edits.

Since these are BlackBerrys, they have physical, illuminated thumb keyboards. (Take that, iPhone!)

A hundred ingenious shortcuts save you time. Hit Space twice to get a period, a space and a capped next word. Hit Space when you’re typing an e-mail address to get the @ symbol. Apostrophes appear in contractions automatically. And so on.

The much-improved Web browser is still not as nice as the iPhone’s; you can’t rotate the screen for ease in reading wide columns, for example. And there’s no touch screen (let alone multitouch), so you can’t pinch or spread your fingertips to zoom in and out. Instead, Web pages appear in miniature; you click the trackball to zoom in. It works well enough.

Both phones are sharp-looking, shiny and black, with bright, crisp screens (320 x 240 pixels on the Flip, 480 x 320 on the Bold). The headphone jack accommodates any headphone — or you can listen over Bluetooth stereo wireless headphones, a delicious and underhyped option. Removable battery, physical volume and camera keys and MicroSD memory-card slot are all standard.

The Flip and the Bold can both hop onto wireless hot spots for speedy Web browsing and e-mail downloads. Each has a two-megapixel camera, with a tiny flash, that can also record video. Frankly, the photos and videos both look pretty lame — a rare exception to the “top-tier” mantra for these phones.

In other words, a rock-solid, corporate-dependable, e-mail-centric heart still beats inside these flashier, catchier BlackBerry models. Yet the Flip and the Bold are actually aimed at opposite ends of the audience spectrum.

The Flip, intended for the consumer masses, works great as a clamshell; the outer screen identifies incoming calls, notifies you of new e-mail and even lets you see the first couple lines of your messages. (Why doesn’t it act as a self-portrait screen when you’re using the camera, though?) And, of course, it’s handy to be able to answer a call just by opening the hinge, and hang up by snapping it shut.

Still, the Flip costs half as much as the Bold, and that’s no accident. It’s thickish, and it feels insubstantial. Worse, it’s slow; you sometimes wait several seconds for the response to a button press, and on T-Mobile’s slow, non-3G cellular network, waiting for the Web is agonizing. The software has a few bugs to be ironed out, too.

Like the BlackBerry Pearl, the Flip has only 14 keys to represent the whole alphabet. They’re huge, so they’re easy targets, but there are two letters painted on each key. The software generally figures out what word you’re typing, but fussy manual intervention is sometimes required — when you’re typing in some oddball last name, for example, or when more than one word could come from the same combination.

CONTINUED

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