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Bold 9900

The 9900 was among the first phones to feature the new and fluid BlackBerry 7 OS. Most BlackBerry users among them the mail-checking business types and the ever-tweeting social networking types might feel stifled if they had just touch,to reply to office mail,or update their status. So Bold 9900 is a touch and type phone,like many others launched in the recent months.

But that doesnt mean either feature is sub-standard on its own. The touchscreen is very responsive,but does not support a text input option. I thought the option could have been included,just in case. But the brilliance of having the added advantage of touch becomes evident,for instance,when you realise you can swipe from one message thread to another.

The new OS also seems at home with both input options and you can flow through the menu and apps with equal ease,using either the 2.8 touchscreen or the optical trackpad. Then,touch also adds some extra dimension to Web browsing,especially since this phone is optimised for HTML5.

BlackBerry claims this is their thinnest phone yet,though I thought the Curve 9360 is just as lean,but the 9900 looks big thanks to its width and metallic finish. But maybe thats okay for a phone called Bold. A new addition to the design is the camera button just beside the keypad. I think this was added to flaunt the phones strongest features its 5 MP camera,which is capable of the 720p HD video recording and 4X digital zoom. There is also a flash thrown in for good measure,along with face detection,geo-tagging etc.

RIM claims the new Bold is twice as fast as its older phones,running on the BlackBerry 5 OS. From the browsing and HD video features,I had to agree. The phone comes with 768 MB RAM and 8 GB of storage and is NFC enabled which allows for information exchange between two proximate instruments. At Rs 32,490,the new Bold is not a bad deal for a heavy-duty business phone.

Curve 9360

If you now see teens chatting away to glory with their friends using BBM,or office trainees checking their new corporate mail accounts on their new colourful BlackBerry,it is all due to a genre of devices called the Curve. The Curve 8520 helped the BlackBerry lose its upper management only tag.

To consolidate the success of the Curve 8520 and 9300 comes the much sleeker and more powerful 9360. As someone using a 9300,I found this new Curve an object of envy. The phone is so light that you wouldnt imagine it would be able to do some of the heavy-duty stuff the company boasts of.

If there was something that prevented me from queuing up for an upgrade,it was the Rs 19,990 price tag,which gives this phone an upper management only feel.

But if you decide to buy the new Curve,it will not disappoint. For along with the all the regular BlackBerry features,it also includes a 5MP camera with flash and video recording,a microSD/SDHC slot that supports up to 32 GB and is NFC enabled.

The new BBM allows you to stay connected all the time. The Social Feeds 2.0 app is also much better than the earlier versions. Despite the price,there is just 512 MB of internal memory,though expandable up to 32 GB with a MicroSD.

Torch 9860

If you can control a BlackBerry with just touch,this is the phone for you. The all-touch 3.7 display on the new Torch is the largest on a BlackBerry smartphone,giving a new feel to browsing,checking mails and gaming. The new Torch too runs on BlackBerry 7 and combines a high-performance graphics processor with an extra fast CPU to deliver a highly responsive touch interface with incredibly fast and smooth graphics. The phone comes with 4 GB internal memory,a 5MP camera with 720p HD video recording and costs Rs 28,490.