BlackBerry Bold 9650 The Bold 9650 replaces the BlackBerry Tour as Sprint and Verizon's high end non-touch screen model with world roaming. The Bold closely resembles its GSM sibling the Bold 9700 and it's quite compact. It has EV-DO 3G for fast data, GSM roaming capabilities, a 480 x 360 display, an optical trackpad rather than a trackball, GPS and WiFi too.
BlackBerry Bold 9650 - Research In Motion (RIM) April 2010 introduced the BlackBerry Bold 9650 smartphone in the latest generation BlackBerry is spelled Bold.Ponsel Advanced, powerful and feature-rich BlackBerry Bold 9650 is a smartphone for the global CDMA subscribers
The Bold offers a few key improvements over the BlackBerry Tour, and they're likely good enough reasons to upgrade from an older BlackBerry. However, if you're a Tour owner, the improvements probably don't warrant an out of cycle upgrade. New goodies in the Bold 9650 include an optical trackpad, double the RAM and the addition of WiFi. The added RAM makes for a speedier 'Berry, even though the CPU isn't any faster. The optical trackpad means no more worrying about balky trackballs that fall prey to pocket lint and dust.
As we noted with the BlackBerry Bold 9700 on T-Mobile and AT&T, the slightly higher than iPhone 3GS resolution crammed into a tiny 2.8" display makes for tiny text, particularly in web pages. We found we had to zoom in at least 2 levels before we could easily read text on non-mobile sites and that our eyes were feeling mighty tired after a half hour of casual web surfing.
The keyboard is the standard Bold style with the wave-sculpted keys vs. the flat keys on the Curve line. I do find it easier to type quickly on the wave keyboard since it prevents finger slips and provides superior tactile feel.
Much ado has been made of the raised buttons above the keyboard for call send, call end, back and the menu key. Instead of sitting lower than the keyboard keys as they do on the Bold 9700, they're the same height as the key tops. Honestly, it's caused me no problems but from a tactile standpoint, the raised buttons do make it harder to sense where the keyboard ends.
In contrast, the trackpad is a definite improvement over the trackball: it's equally as responsive and an extension of your mind as was the trackball but it doesn't get stuck or mucked up.
Phone and Data
The BlackBerry 9650 has excellent voice quality on both incoming and outgoing ends and as expected it has the best push email experience on the planet. Reception on our unit was flaky, and bounced around quite a bit while our other Sprint phones remained stable. Overall 1x (voice) and 3G (EV-DO Rev. A) reception was middling in stark contrast to GSM Bold models that have incredibly good reception. Download speeds over EV-DO Rev. A were very good, though that fast data connection didn't do wonders for web browsing. Why? RIM's web browser is slow. It still has trouble rendering some HTML desktop sites and Javascript adds about 10 seconds to page load times on full HTML sites. You can turn off Javascript in prefs, but you lose useful things like dynamically generated content and advanced menus. We can't wait for BlackBerry OS 6 and the new Webkit-based web browser!
If cellular data doesn't excite you, the Bold has WiFi too. If you're in a non-3G coverage area it's most welcome when downloading apps from BlackBerry App World.
The Bold 9650 is a world phone: it runs on Sprint's CDMA network here in the US and on GSM abroad (Europe and Asia are mainly GSM). It's a quad band GSM world phone and it has 3G HDPA on the 2100MHz band used in Europe and in some areas in Asia. The phone won't work on US GSM networks (they're locked out) and Sprint says that you should call to enable GSM roaming 24 hours in advance of your trip. There's a SIM card slot under the battery with a Sprint-supplied SIM card pre-installed.