In a nutshell: The BlackBerry Bold is the best BlackBerry yet, although its size and weight mean that it's for serious users only. If you're a serious user, you'll love the full keypad, outstanding email support, high-res display with user-selectable fonts, 3G HSDPA, 1GB of built-in memory, WiFi, satnav and many other features.
At last - A 3G BlackBerry! Whilst BlackBerry is the undisputed king of mobile email, the lack of 3G in its devices was beginning to look very obvious. Enter the BlackBerry Bold, with full support for HSDPA-enabled 3G, making fast data transfer a reality. No more waiting while email attachments are sent!

The BlackBerry 9000 Bold takes the best of everything that BlackBerry has previously produced, and adds in 3G. It's also the biggest and heaviest BlackBerry, so is suitable only for heavy duty users. Weighing 136g, it's very slightly heavier and thicker than the BlackBerry 8820, which it replaces. In practice you can't tell the difference in size between the two devices. Despite its size, it's an attractive design, with its shiny black and silver finish, and some nice curves to (literally) take the edge off its bulk. The benefit of having such a large device is that there's plenty of room for a full QWERTY keypad, so there are no compromises here when it comes to the ease of text entry. The keypad combined with the trackball together provide the best UI that we've seen for serious emailers and texters. We're also delighted to see that BlackBerry have increased the resolution of the display from 240 x 320 pixels on previous models to 480 x 360 pixels on the Bold. With a 65,000 colour transmissive TFT LCD and user-selectable font sizes, this gives the Bold one of the best displays available, with only the iPhone offering a higher resolution.

The advanced phone features include a speakerphone and conference calling. With voice activated dialling and a Bluetooth headset, it's capable of fully handsfree operation.

Email is BlackBerry's forte, and the Bold fully supports all email standards:

• Push email (messages are delivered automatically to your smartphone and you can be notified as soon as they arrive)
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Microsoft® Exchange
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for IBM® Lotus® Domino®
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Novell® GroupWise®
• Integrates with an existing enterprise email account
• Integrates with existing personal email account
• Integrates with optional new device account
• Web-Based Email Access (AOL Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail)

You can view attachments in the following formats: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, WordPerfect, HTML, zip.) WordToGo and SlideshowToGo let you edit Word and PowerPoint files. Security is given full attention, with password protection and a keyboard lock, plus full support for encryption when using BlackBerry Enterprise Server to access data.

The Bold also incorporates some fun features, in particular the camera and media player. The camera is rated at just 2 megapixels, so this is no replacement for a digital camera, but it can take snaps and video clips. The media player offers light relief between meetings, and can play music and videos. Software is provided for ripping music off CD's and for synching your phone with your PC. In common with previous BlackBerries, there's a 3.5mm headset jack, so you can plug in any third party stereo headphones - a feature that's still surprisingly rare in the mobile phone world. GPS navigation is also included, and works with Blackberry Maps. This is another welcome feature, and can in principle be used as satnav for a car, but perhaps a more obvious use is navigating around a city by foot or public transport, as most Bold users probably already have a proper satnav system in their car.

BlackBerry have also done the right thing when it comes to memory, equipping the Bold with a full 1 GB of built-in memory, plus 128 MB of flash memory and the ability to expand this further by adding a microSD memory card. This gives plenty of space for storing and working with data, and is what a device of this power needs.

Connectivity options include WLAN (802.11a/b/g), as well as Bluetooth 2.0 and USB.

The battery life is not quite as long as the BlackBerry 8820, due partly to the larger screen, and partly to the fact that it's a 3G phone. However, we don't anticipate that this will be a major problem, provided that you charge the phone regularly, and condition the battery properly at the start.

All things considered, we love the BlackBerry Bold. It was fairly obvious what BlackBerry needed to do to bring their devices bang up to date (add 3G, a higher resolution screen, more memory and a faster processor), and they've done precisely that. The result is a brilliant communications device and all round PDA. Highly recommended. If you can live without the 3G network and would like a more compact device, then we would also highly recommend the BlackBerry 8900. However we have noted that several of our users have reported the Bold's tendency to drop the 3G signal. We believe that this is a network issue that is not present in sim-free handsets, and can possibly be fixed by updating your sim card or talking to your network.