BlackBerry 9720 review

If playing games and watching movies is high on your wish list, then don't buy the BlackBerry 9720. The 2.8-inch display is never going to offer a cinematic experience.

There's only 512 MB eMMC storage built-in, so you need a microSD card if you want to load any music or videos onto your phone. Luckily the BlackBerry 9720 can take a microSD card up to 32GB in size.
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By far the easiest method of loading content is to put the microSD card into your computer and transfer everything you want over before putting it into your BlackBerry 9720.

If you don't mind using the BlackBerry Desktop Software then you can just drag and drop files, but it does mean installing software, hooking up your BlackBerry 9720, and waiting for it to connect and sync.

Music

The music player works well. It automatically lists all of the music you have on your microSD card and it will play through in order, or you can shuffle. It's fairly barebones in terms of options though.

The sound quality isn't too bad, but obviously improves greatly when you put on the supplied earphones. You can also dive into the headset equalizer and tweak the settings to match your music. You can change the bass level, or choose genres like jazz, rock, or dance.

You can browse by song, artist, album or genre, and it's easy to create a playlist. Once the music has started you can skip out of the app without stopping playback. If you're using the earphones then you've got a small volume rocker and you can quickly mute if you need to.

On the phone itself you can tap the menu button to skip back into the app and you can bring up controls by pressing one of the volume keys on the right spine.

There is also an FM radio and you'll have to plug the earphones in to use it because they act as an antenna. We were unable to find a station, but the BlackBerry 9720 was tested in an area with poor reception, so your mileage will vary.

Video

The video player is also pretty basic. There are no real options to play with. Videos look OK; obviously the 480 x 360 pixel resolution is a major limitation. Streaming videos from various websites, or from YouTube, works well as long as you have a decent Wi-Fi connection.

In terms of audio and video file formats the BlackBerry 9720 supports pretty much everything including MOV, MP4, AVI and WMV. We didn't encounter any problems playing back files.

Photos

All of your photos automatically go into the pictures app on your BlackBerry 9720 and they appear in a chronological grid format.

It's easy to view them as a slideshow or set an image as your wallpaper via the menu button. You can also share, rotate, or zoom, but don't expect any photo editing tools beyond that because they aren't there.

There's no DLBA support here, so you'll need to transfer videos and photos if you want to watch them on your big screen.