I’ve been waiting for the Blackberry Bold 9900 to come out for AT&T ever since I first heard about it. I had a Bold 9000 that I loved the most out of any phone I’ve ever had. I lost that phone on campus at Ursinus (RIP Angela’s Blackberry Bold 9000, October 2009-December 2, 2009) and replaced it with a Bold 9700, which was nice, but I liked the size and shape of the 9000 better. Now I’ve got the 9900 and it is amazing. It is exactly the phone I want. It has the OS, hardware, and network (4G) upgrade I’ve been craving. It is similar in size and shape to the 9000, but it’s slimmer and lighter.
The best part is that the screen is a touch screen but it still has the full physical keyboard (similar to my old Palm centro that I loved). I HATE the touch-screen-only keyboards. I just do not want a touch screen only phone, which is one of the reasons I’ll never own an iPhone, or any of the super trendy Android phones (although I suspect I’d like the Android OS better than the BB OS if they put out a phone I would actually use). That Palm centro had a lot of great features that I missed when I switched to Blackberry (touch screen PLUS physical keyboard was the biggest, but it also had conversation style texting which didn’t come out until several BB OS upgrades after I’d switched, and a couple other things I can’t think of right now), but it was kind of slow, the OS and UI in general wasn’t much to write home (or blog) about, and the browser and email capabilities were so lame that I didn’t even bother putting a data plan on it. And I know the Blackberry Torch has been out for a while and it has a touch screen and a full keyboard, but it’s a slide-out keyboard, and it’s an adaptive screen (like the iPhone, the screen can be landscape or portrait). I like the physical layout of the Bold much better than the Torch, which is why I never shelled out the cash for a Torch even though I was tempted. The Bold’s screen always faces one way so you don’t have it trying to guess which direction you want it, and it’s all one piece (no flipping open or sliding out necessary).
So basically, this phone is a combination of the three phones I’ve had in the past that I loved, with all of the features I missed from old phones and an improvement over all of the features from those phones that I didn’t like. I was really excited to get it. And now I have it and I’ve got a fun, shiny new toy to play with. I doubt I’ll change how I use it compared to how I used my old phones (it’s not really changing my life in a fundamental way at all) but I can now do all my normal phone stuff faster, and with a touch screen if I want. I can already tell the 4G network is faster than 3G, and I can tell that this phone operates a lot more smoothly and quickly than the 9700, but I can’t tell if that’s due to software or hardware. Either way, I’m happy. 🙂
The only disappointment is that this is on AT&T’s 4G HSPA+ network, not their 4G LTE network. I wouldn’t care, except that 4G LTE is actually available here in the Dallas area and I wish I could take advantage of it. This model will never be 4G LTE capable, so if down the road I want to be able to use the LTE network, I’ll have to buy a new phone. If there were a chance they were going to re-release this model with 4G LTE capability within the next year or so, I probably wouldn’t have bought this one and would have held out hope for an LTE capable 9900 model. But, here in reality, the chances are that they won’t release another phone like this one that is so precisely tailored to the exact features that I was looking for AND that is LTE capable. AT&T is still rolling out their LTE network, so it’ll be a while before they have a substantial library of LTE devices and I’ll even have to worry about this. Plus, I won’t be eligible for another upgrade for at least another 18 months, so it won’t even be a temptation to get a new phone until then. So I can be happy with this one for now with no regrets. 🙂

Sent from my Blackberry