A Look At How The Blackberry 9900 Bold Touch Has Improved Since The Bold 9780

RIM have recently strengthened their Blackberry range of handsets with the addition of the new 9900 Bold Touch device. Rather than follow in the footsteps of models such as the Torch the 9900 has seen the brand return to the traditional Qwerty keypad phone that made them famous. How does this new top of the range handset measure up against the Bold 9780, successor to the popular 9700 model?

With modern smartphones performing an endless number of tasks the processor speed has become a vitally important aspect of the modern device. The 9900 Bold Touch is the most well equipped Blackberry handset in this area thanks to a powerful Snapdragon chipset. The Qualcomm Scorpion MSM 8655 processor runs at a very fast 1.2Ghz and despite being only a single core chip it adequately handles every task that is asked of it. The Bold 9780 offers a more average chip in the form of a 684Mhz processor. Despite being nearly half the speed of the Bold 9900 Blackberry do manage to squeeze great performance from it but unfortunately it simply cannot live up to the overall power boasted by the newer device. Another area where we have seen some improvements is with the camera facilities fitted on both models. Both models sport a still camera capable of capturing 5 mega pixel images but the Bold Touch offers the addition of Geo Tagging together with impressive high definition video capture which is lacking on the Bold 9780.

When we take a look at the displays on the two models the Blackberry 9900 Bold Touch continues to impress thanks to its excellent screen technology. Measuring 2.8 inches the screen can display a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. Despite this figure sounding much lower than many smartphones we do have to consider that the screen is also much smaller. To put things into perspective the pixels per inch rating of the device is 285 which is one of the highest ratings available and only bettered by one or two other phones including the excellent iPhone 4. Although the display is a capacitive touchscreen Blackberry have opted to also include an optical trackpad for more precise navigation. This is particularly useful for editing text documents and e mails. The screen on the 9900 is a big step up from the 9780 which sported a smaller display of just 2.4 inches together with a lower resolution of 480 x 360 which results in a total PPI rating of just 245.

It is pleasing to see Blackberry return to their roots with this new model and what is particularly good is that the model is now well equipped enough to compete with the many powerful smartphones that are currently available.