BlackBerry Bold 9780: Not So Bold

Battery Life and Call Quality

The Bold 9780 comes with RIM’s workhorse 5.4Whr M-S1 battery and the overall battery life is very good, in typical BlackBerry fashion. Although you can find specific numbers from our battery life suites listed below, in actual day-to-day use, the phone easily lasted 3 days with normal use that included some calls, texting, emails (push enabled), surfing over WiFi/3G, etc. It felt great to break the habit I had developed of plugging a phone into its charger every night before hitting bed.

Also, aside from Apple whose rated battery life is pretty accurate, there are very few other device vendors who provide even semi-reasonable battery life ratings. RIM on the other hand has gone the other way around and been curiously conservative with its estimates. The 9780 beat RIM's estimated 3G talk time of "up to 6 hours" by posting a time well over that mark of 7 hours and 22 minutes though this was with UMA turned off (as WiFi was turned off).

I also tried running the test with UMA (more on that below), but I realized that the phone arbitarily switches to 3G-only even when its location has not changed. In view of presenting consistent, repeatable results here, I decided to not go ahead with the UMA test. Understandably, the battery life will take a hit using UMA as the 802.11 b/g radio is running in addition to the cellular baseband radio.

Call quality was also pretty good with nothing in particular to report. The speakerphone volume is plenty loud and audible even in moderately noisy environments. If I really wanted to find a fault with the audio quality, it would be that the voice over the speakerphone sounded more ‘tinny’ than it usually does on most mobile phones, but really, that’s just me being picky.

The Bold 9780 switches to UMA mode when it detects a known WiFi network (left)

It is also interesting to note that the Bold 9780 review sample we had, being on the T-Mobile network, supports the UMA standard. Unlicensed Mobile Access is a name given to a technology known as Generic Access Network that allows seamless handoff of GSM/UMTS protocol-traffic between cellular networks and unlicensed spectrum such as 802.11. In other words, UMA can potentially use WiFi networks you have logged into to route phone traffic, thereby improving your network "coverage" and reducing the congestion on the carrier network. Both the device and the network need to support this feature in order for it to work.

Moving on, the Bold 9780 seems to hold onto the signal very well. The antenna is located in the lower middle section of the device, not directly accessible without opening the phone up. Because of this, I had to go through an extraordinary amount of effort to "cup tightly" and register the 19 dBm drop in signal. Likewise, even when held naturally the signal drops by about 11 dBm only in certain cases at locations where I don't get very good coverage. The majority of the time, the Bold showed almost no signal attenuation under normal usage when the cellular coverage is good. This is why I have marked the cupping tightly number for the 9780 with an asterix as it was definitely not normal, even for the tough cupping test.

Update: As pointed out by one of our readers in the comments, I have updated the signal attenuation numbers based on the readout from the hidden Engineering Menu. Thanks for pointing that out Faruk88!