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We're glad to say that the internet experience on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is top notch as far as BlackBerry devices go. This is a fairly significant statement, because up until just over a year ago when BB6 hit the streets, the web browsing on a BlackBerry device was poor to say the least.
Luckily once RIM started pursuing its own WebKit solution, things got a bit better and here we are now.
We'll get the negatives out of the way first. There's no Flash. We always go on about this so we won't bother now - especially because Flash has become less and less important and significant. Indeed, Adobe has said it plans to drop Flash support for mobiles and concentrate on PCs and dedicated apps instead.
We need to compare performance slightly to the Bold 9900, because that has a marginally bigger processor at 1.2GHz (compared to the BlackBerry Bold 9790's 1GHz). When we used the 9900 to browse it was good, but we noticed some glitches. Pages took a while to render, for example.
We'd have expected this problem to surface on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 because of the inferior processor, but we had no such issues, which is a big win as far as we're concerned.
Pages don't load as fast as they do on comparable smartphones from other manufacturers, though. You'll not get the blistering speeds of the Samsung Galaxy S2, the iPhone 4S or even HTC Titan here. But the bizarre thing is, because BlackBerry's browsers have always been so pants until recently, you just feel it's par for the course and something to be tolerated.
The touchscreen enables you to navigate that way, but the screen is so small compared to the 9900 that clicking on links can be a bit cumbersome. Indeed, the screen size is the BlackBerry Bold 9790's Achilles' heel for browsing, because it doesn't fit much on.
When you consider we thought the 9900's screen was a little too small for web browsing, you can see why we were frustrated on this handset. Double-tapping enables tap to zoom, and text reflow works well though.
On top of that, you get nice little thumbnails for your browser bookmarks and open windows. Classy, huh?
