BlackBerry Bold 9900

I was a BlackBerry user from 2004 until 2019. The Bold 9900 was peak smartphone IMHO.

Not the person you're replying to, but I was a big BB user in the 2000s and had the Blackberry Passport briefly in 2015 to test its Android app compatibility (it was pretty damn compatible!). What I discovered was that the best BB keyboards for error-free typing were the curved 4-row keyboards on the Bold 9000, 9700 and 9900. The Passport kb was flat, rectangular and only had 3 rows over a very wide layout and placed at the very bottom of the phone, making it cramped to type on. I love the idea of keyboard phones but only BB of yore did it right.

Hi there, I had several BlackBerry phones, including a Passport SE. For productivity apps, nothing compared with the Bold 9900. So snappy and minimalistic. The memos, calendar, messaging and the like were great. As far as BB10 devices go, the Passport had the screen real estate, but the Q10 was way more pocketable. So I found the Passport awkward to deal with when on the move. I still have all of them. Who knows what to do with functional old tech?

Is that a blackberry bold 9900 keyboard ? Had one of those IRL and they were glorious. Could this used as ssh terminal?

I was the same way. I only had a Blackberry for a short while -- a BlackBerry Bold 9900 (got it in 2012). It was my stop-gap between plain cell phones and my first Android phone (a Droid 4, got it in 2013). Then I moved to touch screens with the Samsung Galaxy S4. I'm currently a Pixel 7 user. Nothing ever matched the typing speed of the Blackberry Bold 9900. I was slowed down a bit by the slide-out on my Droid 4, and slowed down a TON by switching to touch. I could actually "do email" on my Blackberry. At essentially the same speed as my laptop. But, even today, with many years of practice, including swipe, text prediction, and all the rest -- writing a mid-size email on my phone is excruciatingly slow vs my typing/thinking speed. As a simple example, sometimes I try to transcribe text from a podcast I'm listening to on my phone. It's basically impossible -- I have to go back frequently, slow it down to 0.7x audio speed, etc. But, if I transcribe text on my laptop, I can do it so fast that I type ahead of the speaker, even a fast talker. It makes a difference. I could have transcribed a live speaker on my Blackberry Bold. I could even type at thinking speed, which was great. Alas. Two steps forward, one step back.

I still miss the bold keyboard, BBM, and the (customizable) notification LED.

Speaking of the 9900 here… Maybe it was the size of my hand but I found the form factor hit a sweet spot. I could navigate every thing with my thumb. I could do this because of the swipe pad in the center and the size and layout of the touch screen. This coupled with the keyboard shortcuts made that model an ergonomic joy. The second reason for my comment is because during this period of time phones seemed to strike a better balance between phone usage and media consumption. Granted, this wasn’t necessarily unique to BB but I found their limited App Store to be a feature.

I used to be very ambivalent about BB devices, until I spent some time recently using a BlackBerry 9900. I'd read about the BlackBerry OS being behind the times, and outdated, but as I used the 9900, I just wasn't seeing it. The touchscreen looks and works extremely well, the OS is smooth and responsive, and looks great too. And the web browser rendered every mobile site I loaded perfectly. I know it is popular to cast BB devices as horribly outdated, but after using the 9900, I found myself seriously considering purchasing one and selling my iPhone 4. I love my iPhone, but the BlackBerry really impressed me. This is anecdotal, I know...but perhaps we're all writing RIM off too soon?

A couple years before that the Blackberry 9900 added a touchscreen to their standard form factor and even without using the touch feature it was more than usable to browse the web on. The small click/touchpad was a delight to use.