BlackBerry Bold 9700 review

Like the internet browser, the camera on the BlackBerry Bold isn't going to be used to win any photography competitions.

But don't get the wrong idea – we're big fans of the Bold 2 9700's camera, and for what it's designed for, it does a bang up job.

Think about mobile photography for a moment – what's it used for? Taking a picture of something that you want to show your friends, invariably by Twitter these days.

Perhaps on occasion you'll want to zoom in a bit, or maybe take a picture in lower light. Essentially, you want it to work quickly, and with the minimum of fuss.

Well, a 3.2MP camera with flash is certainly going to be good enough for that, and you can add to the mix the fact the Bold 2 9700's camera appears to be better than the iPhone's.

In normal daylight, the phone captures images well, picking out a pretty good level of detail (although colours aren't as well formed as they could be).

And as for the LED flash – well, that's not going to be used to illuminate a complex night scene any time soon. Should you want to take some nice pictures of your friends, then you should make sure you're up nice and close in order to get the maximum throw (and you might want to warn them about the bright light you're about to flash into their eyes).

The 2x digital zoom, handily operated by the optical trackpad, is a nice touch as well – especially as beyond that the phone can't really handle that much detail.

Add to that a decent autofocus and the ability to tweak white balance, and photos come out looking half decent on a phone that has a camera almost as an afterthought.

And that's all your really need in a phone like this – as we mentioned the primary function is generally to leave the image on your phone, or maybe upload it to a relevant website. With that in mind, RIM has added simple cropping (for contact profile use) and renaming functions to the photograph review pane, before you can send it off to Facebook or email or even through MMS (shocker, we know).

Video recorder

Video is pretty much the same as the camera – it's there, it can record and it will capture footage for those odd moments when you want to share them with mates later.

It's only HVGA, so there's not a lot of point putting it on any larger screens – but then again, we don't expect that you'd want to. The Bold 2 9700 captures a fairly high amount of detail in the videos, and with the chop-less footage quality, appears to be offering a fairly high frames per second capture.

While there's no full video suite to play with afterwards, at least you can rename and replay the file to your heart's content – and if the video's not too large you can send it on too. What fun!