In the weeks just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday my 3 year old Blackberry 8100 was failing. The mechanical trackball from which the models “Pearl” nickname was derived was simply failing. I cleaned it a couple of times but each time it would again become unresponsive after just a few days. It’s time had come.
I wasn’t settled upon another Blackberry as it’s replacement. I had been happy with the handset for a long time, but felt that a full keyboard would better meet my needs moving forward.
Further, while I was interested in Android powered phones, I wasn’t willing to change carriers based solely on hardware availability. I’m basically happy with T-Mobile. I wasn’t about to move to Verizon Wireless just to get access to a Motorola Droid.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I finally caved in, the combination of holiday special pricing and a failing old phone was too much to avoid. I was eligible for a discount if I renewed my contract, which was a perfectly sensible move. In fact, since I have a family plan with two handsets I found that I was eligible for two discounted handsets, which could come in handy later on.
I went to a T-Mobile store and examined the handsets on offer. The leading candidates were the Blackberry 9700, G-1 and MyTouch 3G. The G-1 felt too chunky, and seemed like it was moving into the twilight of its life cycle as a product. The MyTouch didn’t have a full keyboard, which left me with the Blackberry 9700.
Since I had been very happy with my old Blackberry I was comfortable making that choice. The upgrade pricing combined with the holiday special meant that I left the shop having parted company with about $180 for the handset and a simple gel case. The handset actually included a leather case with a belt clip, but I like the protective gel cases and prefer to not put the phone on my belt much of the time.
The first thing you’ll notice about the 9700 is that the display is beautiful. While not especially large for a smartphone, and not a touch screen, it’s truly an outstanding LCD. The display features good color reproduction, decent resolution, and it’s driven by a very peppy processor.
The mechanical trackball has been replaced by an optical trackpad. It took me literally only a few minutes to become accustomed to this change. After a month of using the 9700 I wonder how I ever got by with the Pearl. The trackpad is dramatically better than the old hardware.
On the other hand, the keyboard took me some time to appreciate. Long ago I bought the Pearl specifically because it didn’t have a full keyboard. As my first smartphone I thought there could be an issue with me responding to emails in a knee-jerk fashion. The Pearl style keyboard was very inconvenient to use, which meant that it wasn’t easy to compose emails on the Pearl. I had to really want or need to reply to something to go to the trouble of responding on the phone.
The 9700s keyboard has smallish keys, or perhaps I have large fingers. I’m still working on ensuring that I don’t mistype when composing messages on the 9700.
I was more than a little dismayed to see that the 9700 features a micro-USB charging port. I’ve got a good sized box of old cell phone chargers in my closet but this was the first phone that I’ve had that uses this new standard.
So I had to accept that I was going to be forced to buy all new charging accessories. I typically like to have two AC chargers (home & traveling) and one car charger. In fact, my recent experience with micro-USB chargers and power cables deserves its own post, so I’ll leave it for another time.
Speaking of connectors, I was again a little dismayed to find that the 9700 uses a 3.5mm connector for the wired headset jack. That means that it doesn’t accommodate my favorite Etymotic wired headset, at least not without some form of adapter. That headset has a 2.5mm 3 conductor plug more common to MP3 players.
The 3.5mm 4 conductor jack is wired to handle a stereo headset with a mic element, reflecting the fact that the 9700 is a phone but includes some very usable media playback tools. I’ve used the 9700 to listen to some podcasts while traveling, although since I don’t yet have a suitable wired headset I’ve been using my Plantronics Savi Go Bluetooth headset.
I found that Slacker Radio was installed, and listened to a comedy channel one evening while killing time in a hotel. I can see that coming in handy as I travel.
I have found the phones wifi capability to be especially handy. When within range of a wifi network the 9700 can be set to use this wireless access instead of the 3G or 2G cellular radios. Thus when in wifi range all traffic uses the wifi radio…even voice calling. This is called “UMA” access and its very similar to T-Mobile’s @home service. UMA stands for “Unlicensed Mobile Access.”
I found that calling over wifi/uma has been profoundly useful. I was in New Orleans at a customers location and found that I had no T-Mobile coverage while in their building. Since they had an in-house wifi network all I had to do was connect via wifi and it was as if I had seamless 3G throughout the facility. I took incoming calls and made outgoing calls with no issues at all. Their network was a simple 802.11g type so there wasn’t even any special QoS setup. It just simply worked, and that’s just great.
The same holds true around my home and office. I let the Blackberry use the wifi first and 3G/2G as necessary. This priority is user defined. I find that this makes ‘net access on the phone notably faster, including my Twitter client, Seesmic beta for Blackberry. Like a laptop, you can allow the phone to hold setups for multiple wifi networks so that it’s easy to auto-connect when you come into a wifi zone. The phone came with a pre-installed setup for T-Mobile Hotspots.
Under their prior system of service plans T-Mobile would let you purchase a flat rate Wifi calling plan for an extra $9.95/mo. That meant that calling over UMA did not impact your monthly allocation of minutes. When this past fall they got more aggressive about lowering the cost for the normal monthly plans they also eliminated this option on the new plans.
This new billing model doesn’t especially bother me as I have a healthy monthly allocation of minutes. I find that calling over wifi just gives me some flexibility if I’m in an area where coverage is spotty.
In truth I’ve not been able to optimally take advantage of the UMA capabilities around my home & office over the past month. Back in October our Netgear N type wifi AP died. I’ve not had a chance to replace it as yet, instead I dragged and old Linksys WAP-54G out of a closet and put it back into service temporarily. However, I have it on good authority that Santa Claus has taken pity upon us and will be providing a new Cisco SMB-class N type AP very shortly.
One minor addendum: I’ve since been in a Border’s bookstore where I let the Blackberry 9700 mount their free wifi, not issues at all, not even any web login to worry about.
In a more twisted experiment, I found that I was in a location where my Sprint issued Mifi was working well but T-Mobile had no 3G coverage. I set the 9700 to connect to the Mifi and went right on making calls over the Sprint data network.
Not that this first month has been perfect. The Blackberry 9700 has crashed on me three times. Full on, BSOD crash and reboot. And by the way, rebooting the phone takes about 6-7 minutes.
I’ve been thinking about those times that the phone crashed. I think that I see a pattern emerging. It crashed when making UMA calls on a weak and unreliable wifi network where it might struggling to sustain the wifi connection, but not quite losing the wifi enough to jump to the 3G network.
In one case I know that that the crash was caused by heavy data access during a phone call. I had inadvertently invoked a program called “Camera Connect” while on a call. Camera Connect is an application that automatically uploads pictured taken by the phones camera to your PC or social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, etc. In theory this is really handy. Every time you take a picture it uploads over 3G or Wifi.
However, in migrating from my old 8100/Pearl I just moved the 2 GB micro-SD card that I had been using to the new Blackberry 9700. Therefore when I first started up Camera Connect it found a couple of hundred pictures on the media card that it felt it really needed to upload immediately. As I was on the phone at the time the application was running the background (take that iPhone!) and I was not aware of the mighty labor of upload that was underway.
So occupied, the phone became sluggish and in my attempt to understand what was happening I eventually pushed in into a full restart. I don’t consider it so much the fault of the phone as my fumbling around at the time.
Speaking of pictures, the 9700 includes a startlingly good 5 MP camera with a flash. Compared to the marginally useful camera in my old 8100 the Bold2 takes much better pictures. I believe in carrying a real camera and not generally using a camera phone for pictures that I intend to keep. But the camera on the 9700 is much better at taking pics to document things found along the path of life, when you don’t have a real camera handy.
Here are a few samples images. You can click on each to see the full-resolution version.
The view from my seat while en route to Columbus Ohio.
Even in Houston we get fall colors, but it might happen in December! These trees were in a park as I was walking our dog. It was just about sunset.
An award winning holiday display in our neighborhood.
The last topic I want to mention is battery life. Given the pattern of my use of the phone I’ve found the battery life to be adequate. But what that mean exactly?
Under typical conditions it lasts me the day entire for certain. If I don’t use a Twitter app, and so minimize my data access, then it will last me two days. I haven’t been able to determine if using UMA vs 3G makes an appreciable difference in battery life.
Ideally, I’d hope for greater battery life, more akin to what I used to have with my 8100 or Motorola Razr. Admittedly, those devices made little use of data applications and were more like plain vanilla “feature phones.” Battery life was never an issue with them, so that’s a goal that the “Smart Phones” should strive to meet.
I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the Blackberry service outages that have plagued the company this past week. They’re real but for some reason they haven’t impacted me much, if at all. I could be that they occurred during a period when I was not traveling. They seem to impact people who rely upon BIS or BES. I am one of the few who use the desktop redirector to forward my email from my desktop PC to the handheld. Yes, it means that I leave my PC on 24/7…but I’m ok with that, even though many people are not.
I also wonder if the fact that I use the Wifi/UMA access alters the impact profile of the outages. I’ve read many people expressing their frustration about losing access to email and messaging, but I’ve simply not experienced this to the same degree.
I stand by my decision not to change carriers just to get access to an interesting Android-powered phone. With the Google Nexus One reportedly coming early in the new year I may consider another phone as well. As mentioned previously, my account is a family plan, which means that I can get discounted access to two phones if there’s sufficiently interesting hardware available.
I’ll close by saying that after a month of using the Blackberry 9700 I’m still pretty happy with the device.