We recently fondled the substantial BlackBerry Bold 9900, the handsome workhorse of the BlackBerry stable. The new BlackBerry 9790, its younger, slimmer cousin will soon be released in the UK. We ran it through its paces, and it turned out to be more Shetland than stallion.
The new BlackBerry Bold 9790 has nice build quality although it feels slightly plastic-y. It misses the metal touches of the Bold 9900. Though it's thicker by 1mm, the phone is smaller than the 9900 in width and height and this impacts the usability of the phone somewhat as you have a smaller screen and keyboard as a result.
Like the predecessor, it's got a great touch screen, but again, as it's slightly smaller than the 9900 this hampers the user experience.
The resolution is the same as the Bold 9900 but the smaller screen makes websites feel more squashed.
We find the notification blinker really handy. Any device that doesn't ask too much of us is a good thing, and this blinking light tells us when there's a new message. Simple, but useful.
Some social apps, Facebook and Twitter, come pre-loaded and so they should. The less we have to tailor a BlackBerry, and the more intuitive, the better.
The clipped edges of the QWERTY keyboard make it difficult to fault, though (and this is the running theme) the only downside on the 9790 is that the keys are slightly smaller.
You know how iPhone has the now famous Siri? The BlackBerry Bold 9790 has built in voice activation too. Though we get sick of this pretty quickly with most devices. Must be the accent.
Battery life is ok but slightly worse than that of the 9900. Considering the greater girth and the newness of this phone, it is reasonable to have hoped for a bigger battery than the 9900 and more life from a single charge. Even the battery life of this phone is smaller than the 9900.
The camera is a good quality 5 megapixels, although competitors in the smart phone market are peddling 8. And unfortunately HD video recording has been cut from this model, which is a shame, as I don't want to carry around a separate video camera for capturing random awesome moments.
There's room for a bigger memory 32GB memory card, though without HD film to store, you might never get there.
If you're not after a heavy duty phone, then the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is a great option. There are some people around who, apparently, just want to call, BBM and Tweet their friends and this phone more than handles all that.