BlackBerry Porsche P'9981
A PHONE TO DIE FOR
There are enough high-profile fans of the BlackBerry to
make something like this Porsche Design special edition make sense. From
celebrities to CEOs, the BlackBerry still has quite a hold on people as a great
communicator, whether for business or pleasure.
And this Porsche Design P'9981 BlackBerry is something
special. But does it go far enough? Will this give you a BlackBerry experience
that surpasses what you'll find elsewhere? Is this the BlackBerry handset you
should be aspiring to own?
Design
RIM isn't known for design variation. Tracking the family
of the BlackBerry handsets, not a huge amount has changed over the past few
years. The same could be said of Porsche automobiles, but both the Porsche and
the BlackBerry are rather iconic in their design.
The Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9981, however, really
brings some class to the tried and tested Bold formula. Where the standard Bold
blends in with the rest of the BB crowd, the P'9981 is distinct and individual
and really stands out in a sea of similarity.
Whether you like it, or not, will be a case of personal
taste and we've come from a position of thinking it was brash and offensive, to
one where we love the look and feel. You know it's special and so does everyone
you show it to.
Hewn from stainless steel, it's still instantly
recognisable as a BlackBerry thanks to the split face offering a full QWERTY
keyboard below the display. The finish is very good in most places. The
keyboard feels right, the phone looks right from every angle. Where the metal
gives way for the display you have wonderful distinct clean design lines.
But as much as we love the design, it's design where this
phone also suffers. The back is plastic and finished in leather, although it
feels substantial enough when in place it doesn't attach especially well to the
back of the phone.
Like many devices, it uses regularly placed plastic tabs
to hold it on, but on our sample it was all too easy to pop the back off by
accident. Grip the phone wrong and you feel the back detach. Porsche cars have
a reputation for letting the back-end go so we're wondering if it is some sort
of in-joke.
The second point is the positioning of the convenience
key. This is a useful button, which you can program to open an application of
your choice - the default is to launch the camera. It is positioned in the
right edge, exactly where your hand would be if you use a two-thumbed keyboard
technique. On more than one occasion we were furiously typing emails, only to
find we’d launched the camera.
Aside from the overly large box that the phone arrives in,
you also get a matching dock. This too is finished in steel and leather and
features a soft light to guide your Porsche phone in at night for refuelling.
It's a convenient bedside stand and we like it a lot.
This being a dressed-up BlackBerry Bold, the keyboard is
one of the most important elements. At first we weren't sold on it, as the
alternative characters are much more difficult to see than on the regular Bold.
This isn't helped by the decision to move away from the tried and tested black
background, but the backlighting certainly helps make things clearer once you
start typing.
Although the design is sharper, and the cut across the
individual keys is sharper and more defined than on the Bold, that action isn't
too different. Given a couple of days with the phone, we found that using it
became second nature. Despite the changes, it's only really the occasional
moment when you're left looking for a colon that it causes a problem.
Hardware
Internally, there is less to talk about, especially if
you've read our BlackBerry Bold 9900 review. You get a 1.2GHz
processor, 768MB RAM and 8GB of internal memory. BlackBerry has been kind
enough to include a 16GB microSD card too, so you should be well provisioned
for storage.
The screen too, is the same as the original Bold. It is a
capacitive touchscreen, with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. That sounds low
in modern terms, but at only 2.8-inches, it gives you an impressive 287ppi. It
will render fine detail crisply and there is punch and vibrancy to the colours,
but it's let down with a flaky touch response.
We're convinced this is nothing to do with the hardware
and everything to do with the software, more on which later.
Around the back of the phone you have a 5-megapixel
camera, supported by an LED flash. This is lacking in modern terms, not because
of the pixel count, but because it is fixed focus. This sets it behind other
smart phone cameras in terms of results, which aren't as sharp as we'd like.
Given good conditions you'll get snaps acceptable for sharing, but the
inability to focus on close detail is irritating.
The camera also offers you HD video of the 720p variety.
Again, focus is fixed so it's not as adept as some rivals, although this is
less of an issue in mobile video capture. The results are average, a little
noisier than you might expect, but perfectly acceptable for casual use.
The external speaker is surprisingly good and loud. It
lacks bass, obviously, so isn't great for music, but plug in a pair of quality
headphones and the results are good too. The external speaker is in the bottom
of the device and surprisingly it isn't devastatingly muffled when you park it
on the dock.
There is a set of Porsche Design headphones in the box,
which offer an in-line mic, but we weren't taken by the quality of the audio
they offered and were easily surpassed by the Klipsch headphones we tried
instead.
The ear speaker is loud enough and we had no problems
hearing callers, although that neatly designed angular top edge can be a little
uncomfortable against your ear in long calls. We also found we could hear our
end of the conversation being repeated through the ear speaker during a call,
although this might be a problem limited to this device.
Software, apps,
performance
So far the Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9981 has hit most
of the right markers. The hardware looks powerful on paper, the cameras are
okay, but not fantastic, and the design and keyboard are mostly without issue.
But a phone hangs on the software performance, which governs the user
experience.
The theme applied to the Porsche Design handset can be
switched off if you don't like it, although it is nice to have something a
little different. But what it loses is in the app icons. All the native app
icons have been stylised and in the process it all become rather generic, so
it's more difficult to spot the app you want in a flash.
But this customisation only applies to the native and
preinstalled apps, not those you then download, so it does end up being
something of a mishmash.
Starting with the positives, the BlackBerry 7 OS that the
P'9981 sits on provides a great communication experience. BlackBerry's integrated
messaging system and universal search make it easy to find what you're looking
for and managing a busy email life is certainly easy. It's mostly conversant
with things like Google accounts, although it will stumble with multiple
calendars - Google Sync will resolve that for you though.
The combination of touch and type works to a point. You
can quickly select an icon or tap a link, which is better than scrolling across
the optical trackpad to make things happen. But on many occasions, like trying
to press a button at the bottom of the display, the screen doesn't respond.
When people are becoming familiar with a silky smooth and refined touch
experiences elsewhere, BB 7 feels a little rudimentary.
We won't go into more detail of what RIM needs to do to
move the OS forward, but we will stop to talk about the topic du jour: apps.
They have redefined the mobile experience and the BlackBerry, while offering
many and varied applications, finds itself without some of the biggest names.
There is no Skype, for example, no Netflix, no BBC iPlayer and some of the core apps, such as
YouTube, merely redirect to the mobile website. The App World app itself isn't
great and whenever you come to download and install new apps, everything else
grinds to a halt and often begs for a restart.
The browser, although vastly better than previous BB
versions, is no match for Android or iOS. Pinch zooming doesn't work well at
all, scrolling can be slow and jerky, even if pages load quickly enough.
The result is that no matter how well you dress your
BlackBerry, the experience is very much the same. If you spend your time
working through emails sitting in the back seat of a Phaeton, then you probably
won't care. The core BlackBerry services are well integrated and run without a
hitch - except Maps, which is as good as useless. If you're the sort of person
who whiles away time on the train with a little casual gaming, or catching up
on last night's TV, this isn't the phone for you.
And finally…
The last word goes to battery life. With a 1230mAh
battery, the P'9981 struggles to make it through a busy day. Like the Bold 9900, we found that the P'9981 needed to
be charged every night. This is slightly out of character for a BlackBerry
handset, as most of the rest of the range will easily make it through a day. At
least you have that dock to park it on, so you don't need to fiddle around with
cables.
Verdict
It might sound like we've been rather harsh here, but
there's no escaping the fact that the P'9981, Porsche Design or not, it still a
BlackBerry at its core. Where it excels with communication features, it lacks
with entertainment refinement. Whilst the app offering is there, it isn't
anything like as exciting as you'll get on Apple or Android.
You couldn't say the Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9981 was
good value for money, but then you couldn't say that about a Porsche either. A
VW Beetle will get you from A to B comfortably and effectively, but people
still go out and buy the Porsche Cayman. But this is a little like buying your
Cayman with a 1.2-litre Beetle engine: it has the looks and it will get you
there, but not like a Porsche should.
We can't say the P'9981 is any worse than the Bold 9900 in terms of performance. It has the
same positives and the same negatives. Together they offer the best performance
in the current BlackBerry portfolio; if that's the phone you're after. With a
price of €1475 (£1234) it will never
be deemed good value for money, but then what Porsche is?
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