Blackberry's two new models largely hit their marks

By David Pogue

Boy, oh boy. The bunch who brought you the BlackBerry sure has been a band of busy beavers.

With do-everything wonderphones like the iPhone and the G1 “Google phone” breathing down its neck, the BlackBerry’s status as the best-selling smartphone isn’t guaranteed forever. So this fall, Research in Motion is introducing three radically different BlackBerry models, running all of them up the flagpole at once to see who salutes.

First, there’s the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 ($150 with a two-year T-Mobile contract), the first folding clamshell BlackBerry. Second, there’s the BlackBerry Bold 9000 ($300 with a two-year AT&T contract), a luxury-tinged design statement that screams, “Apple isn’t the only one who can do gorgeous!” Finally, there’s the BlackBerry Storm (coming soon from Verizon), the first BlackBerry with a touch screen.

That last phone isn’t ready for review yet; evidently, that Storm is still brewing. But the Flip and the Bold are here – and they’re very nice indeed.

Both phones feature new software, loaded with useful programs (like a slick Clock/Stopwatch app) and white line-drawing icons against a jet-black background. As on the BlackBerry Pearl and the Curve, you navigate by turning a tiny clickable trackball.

As usual, the strength of these BlackBerrys is e-mail, either individual or corporate. The new software offers fully formatted e-mail – fonts, bold, italic and so on – and pictures embedded right in the message. Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments open right up, ready for simple edits.

Because these are BlackBerrys, they have physical, illuminated thumb keyboards. (Take that, iPhone!)

A hundred ingenious shortcuts save you time. Hit Space twice to get a period, a space and a capped next word. Hit Space when you’re typing an e-mail address to get the (AT) symbol. Apostrophes appear in contractions automatically. And so on.

The much-improved Web browser is still not as nice as the iPhone’s; you can’t rotate the screen for ease in reading wide columns, for example. And there’s no touch screen (let alone multitouch), so you can’t pinch or spread your fingertips to zoom in and out. Instead, Web pages appear in miniature; you click the trackball to zoom in. It works well enough.

Both phones are sharp-looking, shiny and black, with bright, crisp screens (320 x 240 pixels on the Flip, 480 x 320 on the Bold). The headphone jack accommodates any headphone – or you can listen over Bluetooth stereo wireless headphones, a delicious and underhyped option. Removable battery, physical volume and camera keys and MicroSD memory-card slot are all standard.

The Flip and the Bold can both hop onto wireless hot spots for speedy Web browsing and e-mail downloads. Each has a two-megapixel camera, with a tiny flash, that can also record video. Frankly, the photos and videos both look pretty lame – a rare exception to the “top-tier” mantra for these phones.

In other words, a rock-solid, corporate-dependable, e-mail-centric heart still beats inside these flashier, catchier BlackBerry models. Yet the Flip and the Bold are actually aimed at opposite ends of the audience spectrum.

The Flip, intended for the consumer masses, works great as a clamshell; the outer screen identifies incoming calls, notifies you of new e-mail and even lets you see the first couple lines of your messages. (Why doesn’t it act as a self-portrait screen when you’re using the camera, though?) And, of course, it’s handy to be able to answer a call just by opening the hinge, and hang up by snapping it shut.

Still, the Flip costs half as much as the Bold, and that’s no accident. It’s thickish, and it feels insubstantial. Worse, it’s slow; you sometimes wait several seconds for the response to a button press, and on T-Mobile’s slow, non-3G cellular network, waiting for the Web is agonizing. The software has a few bugs to be ironed out, too.

The Bold is a very fast little computer, responding instantly to every touch. A gigabyte of storage is built in. The Web and e-mail messages are speedy when you’re in a 3G network area – one of the 320 cities where AT&T has installed high-speed Internet networks. And both new BlackBerrys are quad-band, meaning that they will work in almost any country–if you can afford the roaming fees.

Phone calls on the Bold are unbelievably crisp and clear, and there’s enough power in the built-in speaker to fill your office like a tabletop radio.

The Bold also has GPS with turn-by-turn directions – everything but a windshield suction cup. And like most BlackBerrys, you can charge it from any computer with any USB cable. (The Flip, alas, abandons this tradition and requires a special cable.)

You should note, however, that although the BlackBerry platform is now mature, it’s showing some cracks; with great features comes great complexity. Both phones make you look in three different places for a certain program: on the Home screen, where you can park five favorite icons; in the “expanded Home screen,” which lists a full panoply of icons; and in the Applications folder, which lists still more. This problem will only get worse when the online BlackBerry Applications Store – like the ones for the iPhone and Google phones – opens in March.

There are two different Web browsers, two different e-mail programs, and, on the Flip, six different chat programs. Confusingly, there’s no unified design from one add-on program to the next. The Bold even comes with unsolicited trialware programs, just as on new Windows PCs. Is this what the cell phone is coming to? Yuck.

Keep in mind, too, that a BlackBerry is not an iPod. There’s a music player, and AT&T offers a downloadable music store, but they feel like afterthoughts. Music and video are nowhere close to being highlights of the machine, as on the iPhone.

Even so, RIM is firing on all cylinders these days. If e-mail figures into your mobile life more prominently than entertainment, and if, indeed, you live in an area where T-Mobile (for the Flip) or AT&T (for the Bold) have cell phone coverage, then you’ll be very happy with either one of these phones.

Or, put another way: The BlackBerry brigade is bursting with boasts about both of these beautiful bad boys. But do they bring benefits? Are they best of breed?

You betcha.