The BlackBerry Bold 9700 on AT&T is a powerful, comfortable, and even somewhat chic smartphone—just like the T-Mobile version we reviewed last month. That's all to be expected from an update to the popular BlackBerry Bold 9000, which our Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff carries as his day-to-day business phone. At just $99 with a two-year contract after rebates, the Bold 9700 is a good value for corporate types needing a BlackBerry for work, or for anyone else immune to the iPhone's charms.

Design and Voice Quality
The Bold 9700's design is slightly slimmer and lighter than before. It measures 4.3 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches and weighs 4.3 ounces, half an ounce down from the original. The Bold 9700 still features a faux-leather back panel, chrome accents, and full-size keys that span the entire width of the device. Thin chrome strips divide the individual keyboard rows. The 2.4-inch non-touch LCD looks very sharp and bright. Display resolution gets a slight bump to 480 by 360 pixels. The optical trackpad is an improvement over the failure-prone trackball of old, and the QWERTY keyboard is pretty much perfect; typing was comfortable, quiet, and accurate. The keys exhibit a slight click that's barely audible, with just the right amount of resistance.

The Bold is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and quad-band HSDPA 3.6 (850/900/1900/2100 MHz) device with Wi-Fi. The device logged onto a WPA2-protected Wi-Fi network on the first try. Sadly, the AT&T version lacks T-Mobile's support for Wi-Fi calling, using its Wi-Fi for data only. You can also use the Bold 9700 as a laptop modem with the appropriate data plan; expect download speeds of about 1 Mbps on average.

Voice calls sounded excellent: crisp, clear, and with plenty of gain in both directions. Reception was average. The Bold 9700 came out on top in back-to-back comparisons with an iPhone 3GS, and about the same as an LG Shine II. Calls sounded fine over a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. The powerful speakerphone let me listen to voice mail messages from all the way across my office. Battery life was stellar at 6 hours and 48 minutes of talk time in 3G mode.

User Interface and Apps
Under the hood, the Bold 9700 includes a 624 MHz processor and BlackBerry OS 5.0, which offers threaded text messages, an upgraded Web browser, and other enhancements. Between the new trackpad and the fast processor, the Bold 9700 felt snappy, and it was easy to navigate the menus.

Like all BlackBerrys, the 9700 has push e-mail for various popular account types including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange, as well as optional (free, downloadable) Facebook contacts integration. One thing to watch out for, though—if you don't have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, you can't sync contacts and calendars wirelessly with Microsoft Exchange.

You can browse, buy, and download about 3,000 apps from BlackBerry App World on the device. AT&T Navigator is on board for TeleNav-powered GPS directions. No IM clients are preloaded, but you can download apps for all the major account types for free. The Bold 9700's Documents To Go software views and edits Word and Excel files and displays PowerPoint presentations. Like all BlackBerrys, the Bold 9700 supports up to 10 Web mail, Exchange, and other e-mail accounts plus BlackBerry e-mail.

The upgraded Web browser, as with other recent RIM devices, is still poor. Some links just wouldn't load. Many pages took more than a minute to render, even over Wi-Fi. You can reduce your suffering with the excellent, free Opera Mini 5 beta alternative Web browser.

Music, Video, and Storage
The Bold 9700 is a great music player. Out of the box, it syncs with both PCs and Macs, including syncing unprotected iTunes music and playlists—still an awesome feature. The Bold 9700 comes with wired stereo earbuds, and a side-mounted, standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack makes upgrading simple. MP3, AAC, and WMA tracks sounded smooth over Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. Large album art thumbnails displayed whenever available. You can buy MP3 tracks over the air from Napster or eMusic.

I had some trouble with video playback, though. My Bold 9700 choked on 3GP, MP4, and even other WMV videos the (lower-resolution) Curve 8530 on Verizon had no trouble with. This even happened with a 3GP video I recorded with the handset itself, so something was definitely up with my review unit. RIM says the Bold 9700 supports those video formats, and the T-Mobile 9700 had no problem playing any of those files.

For storing your media files, AT&T throws a 2GB microSD card in the box. There's also 123MB of free internal storage. The microSD card slot is underneath the battery cover, but not the battery. Two microSD cards I tried ended up stuck, and required pulling the battery anyway; a third slid out smoothly. Writing files to a 16GB SanDisk card worked as expected.

Camera and Conclusions
The 3.2-megapixel camera—up from the Bold 9000's 2 megapixels—includes image stabilization, auto-focus, and an LED flash. Test results were more or less identical to the Storm2's on Verizon. Photos were reasonably sharp and well balanced, with a slight reddish tint. Shutter speeds were under one second; the auto-focus added another second to shots. Recorded 480-by-360-pixel videos looked sharp, smooth, and natural at 28 frames per second.

The Bold 9700 is an excellent smartphone, but competition in AT&T's lineup is fierce. The Apple iPhone 3GS remains our Editors' Choice for AT&T smartphones. It offers the best touch interface, media synchronization, and third-party app support on the market, although it lacks a hardware QWERTY keyboard, and isn't as good a voice phone. Loyal Windows Mobile fans fearful of change should check out the AT&T Tilt2, with its 854-by-480 screen, tilting QWERTY keyboard, tight Exchange integration, and beautiful TouchFLO interface. But its creaky underpinnings are vintage 2005 Microsoft, and it's a less successful design overall. While many of RIM's current handsets are good smartphones, the Bold 9700 arguably sits at the top of the heap—and it remains the quintessential BlackBerry.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 6 hours 48 minutes

Compare the BlackBerry Bold 9700 with several other mobile phones side by side.

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