RIM BlackBerry Bold 9790 Pro Reviews

This smartphone is a little fiddly to set up and not as fun to use - or as good value - as an Android or Apple smartphone

Down the scale from the BlackBerry Bold 9900, the Bold 9790 still offers fine value with a good quality screen, decent camera and excellent Qwerty keyboard. As far as apps go, RIM's BlackBerry handsets still have a lot of catching up to do with the likes of Apple and Android, even so BB OS 7 packs in a fair amount of functionality that'll satisfy BBM fans out-of-the-box.

The question on everyone's mind must be how the Bold 9790 will coexist with the Bold 9900. And they're not asking nicely either. People are fuming in the comments and most of them seem to see no point in having two so very similar handsets released fairly soon after one another. We don’t pretend to know how RIM think, but we guess we can see some of their reasoning. Let's look at the facts. It's six months sharp between the release of both phones. Even more, if you acknowledge that the Bold 9790 is only now starting to be available on a broader scale. What it means is the flagship's been paid due respect. The Bold 9900 enjoyed its well-deserved head start. It had its place in the spotlight as the carrier of the new BlackBerry OS 7, the first of the family to cross the 1GHz clock mark and the first to have a VGA screen.

Overall, there is a lot to like about the BlackBerry Bold 9790. It is beautifully designed, has a really nice QWERTY keyboard, and delivers outstanding in-call audio quality. In fact, if you are a BlackBerry enthusiast, you probably needn't look at a higher end model as this one would do the same job just fine.

You might conclude that we don't like the 9790. But that's not it at all. In fact we are just more disappointed at the mistakes BlackBerry has made with it. Yet again we have a phone with a lovely screen, great battery life, and a superb keyboard. All in a package and small enough to fit easily in our pocket. But this is rendered pointless by a few odd design decisions and an operating system that really needs an update. The classic BlackBerry form factor just doesn't work anymore in the world of big screen smartphones. We need a way for the QWERTY expertise to be incorporated into something with a display larger than a matchbox. That aside, if you are part of the social hardcore who likes to be constantly emailing and chatting with friends. This is the best value communicator you could possibly pick up. It grants you access to RIM's speedy world of push email and BBM, whilst not being so budget that it will fall apart in your rucksack. BlackBerry is going to need to do something as significant as Nokia did with the Lumia 800 if it wants to see its decline reversed.

The BlackBerry 9790 is another solid, keyboard-equipped smartphone from RIM, with the very welcome addition of a touchscreen. Its keyboard is decent, screen quality good and interface nice to use. As a budget alternative to the Bold 9900, it does what's required. However, the small, low-resolution screen and still deathly slow uptake of apps mean it trails behind most equivalent phones by some distance. As such it's only really a device we'd recommend to a limited subset of people - those who really want a touchscreen BlackBerry with a physical keyboard.

If you were to take the BlackBerry Bold 9900 out of the equation and judge the BlackBerry Bold 9790 on its own merits, you could quite confidently say it's a cracking little phone. We're not massively excited by it but, geek-speak aside, just the specs alone make it worthy of a £350/$450 SIM-free price tag. If we were torn between the BlackBerry Bold 9790 and the Bold 9900, we'd pick this, albeit at the risk of grumbling about a smaller screen.

At £399, the Bold 9790 is priced much more than the competition. If you have the 9700 or the 9780, I suggest there is no need for an upgrade and if you want a new Blackberry phone with the same OS the Bold 9900 is a much better option.

We're still positive on the Bold 9790, but it does well at fulfilling a niche role of a mid-priced, fixed-QWERTY messaging smartphone and of being the BlackBerry that someone in Jakarta can aspire to. That it's selling in North America is somewhat odd and comes across as over-segmenting the market, trying to cover every possible gap. We liked what we tried, but if we were making the call, we wouldn't be selling the 9790 in Canada or the US.