M A C V A Y S I A

In January, Celcom invited me to a “media sneak preview” of the Blackberry Bold 9700, aka the Bold 2. The best part of the event, other than the awesome food (it was at GSix on the top floor of the Gardens), was the fact that I was given a Bold 9700 to use for a month, for review. Well, here’s my review.

The Blackberry Bold 9700 rocks!

First of all, I love the Blackberry Bold 9700. It’s bigger than any other phone I’ve used, but it’s sleek enough that it doesn’t feel too bulky. Not when it works, anyway (more on that later). It looks great too, though I have a feeling the chrome trim would look crappy after a lot of use.

The screen is obviously much smaller than touchscreen models such as the Storm 2, but it’s still big enough. The QWERTY keypad takes up quite a bit of space (hence the smallish screen), but the individual keys are quite small, which took some getting used to for me because I have really big hands. Still, it didn’t take long to get the hang of it, thanks to the unique ridged shape of the keys, which helps fingers of all sizes find their targets.

Despite the learning curve involved in using the keyboard, I definitely prefer it to a touchscreen. For me this is definitely an advantage of the Bold 9700 over Blackberry’s touchscreen smartphones and also the iPhone. Not only does a touchscreen get dirty real quick, I personally have no confidence in any touchscreen’s ability to withstand repeated pressing, especially from someone who always presses a little too hard.

Another advantage of the Bold 9700 over the iPhone, for me anyway, is that whereas the iPhone seems to be more like a toy, the Bold 9700 somehow seems more ‘professional’. That one’s a bit hard to explain without chugging another coffee, but it goes something like this: think of all the crazy things you can do with an iPhone. Oooh look! You can cock it like a 12-gauge shotgun! Oooh look at that! That app is so cute, it can blah blah blah (insert cute things you can do with an iPhone here)! But with the Blackberry it’s all about communication: instant messaging, email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are probably a million and one silly things you can do with a Blackberry, just as there are all sorts of ways an iPhone rocks. Plus I’m sure I’d do all sorts of silly things with either an iPhone or a Blackberry if I actually owned one. If I had an iPhone I might even get the app that makes the phone mimic a 12-gauge shotgun. Tee hee!

But anyway, somehow I just like the Blackberry. Oh, and speaking of ’silly things’, I have to mention that the Bold 9700 comes with a game I quickly became addicted to: Brickbreaker. I found myself playing it whenever I wasn’t doing anything constructive, and found myself feeling a little disturbed by how much time I spent not doing anything constructive. There are other games on the Bold 9700 but they’re boring as hell. I think they’re card games, I can’t remember. But Brickbreaker, whoo boy. Fun.

I didn’t just play Brickbreaker all the time because I was obsessed with it, though (which I really was, kind of). No, I played it because there really wasn’t much I could do with the Bold 9700 other than play Brickbreaker. Oh, and send and receive calls and SMS. Oh, and take pictures. The Bold 9700 has a great camera which, if you don’t shake it at all, takes decent pictures (shake it and everyone is someone from The Ring who’s going to die in a week). Other than those things, I couldn’t do much with the Bold 9700.

Where exactly is Celcom territory anyway?

I said the Blackberry is all about communication, but maybe I should say it’s all about access. Access to your contacts, access to the Internet, access to all those online applications you normally use to communicate: Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc. The magic of the smartphone is its ability to bring you to those things, or more accurately to bring those things to you, wherever you are.

Unfortunately, the Bold 9700 I had wasn’t very good at bringing the world to me. It did occasionally enable me to get to Twitter and Gmail, but I hardly ever managed to get into Facebook, despite having the appropriate app and, as far as I know, all the correct settings. Most of the time, the sites I just mentioned were unavailable to me, as were all the other sites on that vast landscape known as the World Wide Web. Most of the time, all I got when I tried to connect to anything was a message that said, “The network is currently unavailable, however an old version of the page you requested is available in the cache. Do you want to view the old page?” I suppose viewing cached pages has its uses, but when you’re trying to connect to email and social media, it’s kind of useless. I usually also got this message: “You are currently not in an area that can handle data communication. As a result, the Browser cannot retrieve any Web pages.” You would expect to get that message if you were in fact “in an area that can handle data communication”, but I got it when I was pretty much anywhere, including places like Bandar Sunway, Bangsar, and Cheras. As for Kajang, well it hardly ever worked there.

Because I couldn’t really connect to the Internet, the awesomeness of the Blackberry Bold 9700 was sort of lost on me. In fact, other than the fact that I could take pictures with it and play Brickbreaker, the Bold 9700 was really not much better than my piece-of-crap Nokia 1208. In fact, because of its more compact size, the Nokia 1208 might even win (and it’s even got its own addicting game, Nature Park). Basically, my month with the Blackberry Bold 9700 was like having a sleek, state-of-the-art jet but no suitable runway to take off from. It was like having a Bugatti Veyron but nothing to drive it on except old dirt roads with lots of bumps. To put it as simply as possible: it sucked. For a smartphone, it didn’t seem very smart at all.

After a month, Celcom reminded me it was time to return the phone. They offered me a really sweet deal if I happened to be interested in buying it, but I declined. Not just because I’m broke (babies are expensive, I tell ya, even before they’re born), but because I just couldn’t see myself shelling out money for something that wasn’t much better than my crappy old Nokia that only cost around RM139.

So, to review: Blackberry Bold 9700: Awesome. Celcom: not so awesome.

Yes, Celcom was full of fail this time. Not only did the connection suck, they even gave me the wrong number (that is, the number of the Blackberry I had wasn’t the number on the contract I’d signed). Towards the end of the month I got a bunch of messages saying I’d just signed up for some sort of SMS stock management service, which looked like it cost RM20 per SMS. That guy probably had my number. Then there was the day I returned the phone. I don’t normally go to my office in Bangsar because of the ridiculous amount of money I have to pay for parking/tolls/petrol, but I went to the office one day so I could meet a Celcom rep at Bangsar Village and give her the phone. Well, what was supposed to be a quick post-lunch meeting turned into me sitting on a bench in Bangsar Village until after five, then finally giving up and going home. Another Celcom rep came and got the phone next time I was at the office.

Ah, if only…

Now, despite the title of this post, and the fact that Celcom’s network pretty much ruined my first and only Blackberry experience, I should mention that I really appreciate the fact that they let me use the Bold 9700 for a month. The Celcom reps I dealt with were very friendly, and the one who stood me up in Bangsar did sincerely apologise. I should also point out that they said all the other bloggers/journalists who reviewed the Bold 9700 had great experiences with it, and that maybe Celcom had just given me a bum SIM card, one that didn’t have a good network connection.

I just wish the month had gone differently, because I don’t like having to give a bad review. I did like the Bold 9700, and in fact I do wish I still had one. Leen’s going to give birth to our second child any day now; it would be really cool to ‘live-tweet’ the whole experience. Now I’ll just do what I did when Al was born in 2006: take pictures, then share everything with family and friends (and maybe even blog readers) when I get a chance to go online, which could be several days later. If the folks at Celcom are sure my bad experience was due to some sort of glitch, perhaps they could, oh I don’t know, give me another month with a Bold 9700, one that can actually connect to the Internet. That would be swell.