I [don’t] want my Bold part 2

Time for a trip to the confessional. I gave in and got one (see prior post “I [don’t] want my Bold” August 22-08).

You know, that shiny new Bold that Rogers and RIM (RIM:TSX, RIMM:Q) made {sparsely} available to Toronto-based retail outlets at 5:45 p.m. on Friday last week – four days after the official launch date. I was able to find a shipment two days ago, and there were a dozen or so left for sale.

On the experience front, so far, so good. At least I think that’s the report. The keys are better than on the demo model. If Mercedes rolled out demos that drove worse than the real thing, they’d sell far fewer cars. Too many people told me I would learn to love the trackball, despite my earlier misgivings (see prior post “RIM Makes History” February 13-07). It isn’t to be hated, it turns out.

I had a telephone call of decent length last night, and the handset didn’t burn up in my hand (see BGR for that story “Jimmy mustn’t read blogs” July 23-08). But 30% of the battery was gone in a flash.

The claim that I don’t need to carry an iPod anymore is true, but only if 1GB of space is sufficient for all of your music. My small cache of 631 iPod songs would’ve swamped the Bold’s memory, so I was only able to transfer two different playlists. And, yes, Pearl Jam made the cut.

The photo viewer isn’t nearly as groovy as the iPhone, which means it is largely the same software as the RIM 8700 model. The screen is nice and bright, but the browser defaults to full frame/full page viewing mode, which means you need a telescope to look at Yahoo Finance stock tickers, for example.

The keys are definitely smaller than the 8700, which doesn’t make them impossible to type on, but if you need reading glasses as I do, you can no longer “go Commando”. Something that was easily done on the 8700. ;-(

Will keep you posted.

MRM
(disclosure – I own RIM)