Hands on: BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 review

It's been a long time coming, BlackBerry's touchscreen Bold handset. While the BlackBerry Torch offered both a touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard, it wasn't perfect for keyboard aficionados; that annoying edging, the cramped keyboard… although the touchscreen was nice to have, typing was a bit of a pain.But with the launch of the BlackBerry Bold Touch, its first proper touch and type hybrid, has RIM finally cracked it?RIM has made a bit of a song and dance about the new handset's looks; it's a fair shout. With aluminium highlights it has a nice, solid feel about it, and the woven glass back panel is very sharp and lightweight too. It's so nice to pick up a BlackBerry and it not be a bit brickish. The Bold Touch is RIM's slimmest handset to date, and if you're a regular BlackBerry user you'll really notice the difference. It's rocking a number of buttons around the edge of the handset, including media controls and the camera shutter button. On the front panel, the touch buttons around the trackpad include back, menu, call and end. The back plate is very stylish, and comes off to reveal the small, lightweight battery - which is removable, despite rumours that RIM may opt for a permanent battery. While we love the look and feel of that back plate, we can't help but worry it may be a bit fragile; we'd be wary of taking it off and replacing it too many times lest it become loose and eventually get lost.The screen is just 2.8-inches, which is just a cat's whisker larger than the Bold 9780's 2.4-inch non-touchscreen affair. When we first got our hands on a BlackBerry Bold 9700, we found we automatically went to hit icons on the screen as though it were a touchscreen phone, so it feels really natural to switch between input with the keypad and touch buttons and the touchscreen.The only thing is, 2.8-inches is really a bit too small to function as a touchscreen all the time; we didn't encounter any major problems like tapping the wrong icons, but we did have to make more effort to aim our fingers than we do on the Torch with its larger display.Plus we occasionally encountered issues swiping between screens where the handset was a little slow to respond, so we'd end up swiping again and skipping the screen we actually wanted. But touchscreen woes could be seen as a minor gripe, given than you still have a trackpad and a full on QWERTY to play with. When it comes to actually displaying things, the screen is lovely; the super-sauce GPU and sharp screen resolution really come into their own. The sharp graphics are also highlighted by the new look of BlackBerry OS 7. While you may be sobbing into your Torches at the news that the new OS won't be coming to your handset, its worth taking a look at the Bold Touch. The icons have been slightly redesigned, bringing them more up to date and giving the whole OS a classier feel. Everything is very crisp and smooth, but familiar enough to be easy and comfortable to use. With a 1.2Ghz processor behind it, the BlackBerry Bold Touch is generally quite nippy. The Bold 9780's was 624Mhz, so it's a huge leap for the Bold family. While we didn't have a chance to make it do anything massively strenuous, the only gentle lag we encountered was when swiping the touchscreen, and we'd be prepared to bet that was down to the touch-responsiveness more than anything else.The web interface is also quite pleasant and seems speedier than we were used to over Wi-Fi - RIM says that the BB OS7 browser is 1.6x faster than that on BB OS6 - and while the small screen size means its not as nice to use the browser as it is on the larger-screened Torch, it's not unusable and the zoom function is very smooth. Well, very smooth when it actually worked; the handset seemed to struggle a little with zooming. The model we tested didn't allow us to scroll or zoom using the touchscreen, and when we used the trackpad to zoom instead, it took us all over the page instead of training the zoom on the area we had chosen. At that point we had to scroll all over the place to find what we'd intended to zoom in on in the first place. Hopefully this annoying bug will be sorted out before the Bold Touch gets its retail launch this summer. The contacts menu remains largely unchanged from previous BlackBerry iterations. Likewise, the camera app and media galleries which were all very familiar. The QWERTY keyboard on the BlackBerry Bold Touch is really excellent. It feels much more spacious than even the Bold 9780 and makes tapping out search terms and short messages really quite dreamy. We weren't able to pen any full length documents, though, so we can't vouch for prolonged comfort. BlackBerry OS 7 comes with an updated Facebook app, which looks much more modern than the older version, although navigation was a little trickier; things like notifications and searching friends were not immediately obvious. As an overall experience, we enjoyed using the BlackBerry Bold Touch; it seems a natural progression for the Bold family and offers what we reckon is one of the best QWERTY keyboards on the market. It's just a shame we can't compare it to the BlackBerry Torch 2, which we were hoping would also launch at BlackBerry World this week but is sadly nowhere to be seen. Related StoriesHTC Rider and HTC Kingdom: Fairytale HTC handset pics leakSamsung Galaxy S2 earns best mobile phone titleTechRadar Phone Awards: Vote for your favourite mobile phone appRIM launches BlackBerry Bold TouchBlackBerry OS 7 is not coming to older handsets