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RIM hasn't gone to town on the battery for the BlackBerry Bold 9790. We won't beat around the bush. Under the hood, you'll find nothing more adventurous than a 1,230mAh pack. It's the same as that found in the larger-screened Bold 9900.
Not that it made much difference, since we managed to get comfortably through a day of heavy use and still have about a third of the juice left for nighttime shenanigans. This is the advantage of having a smaller screen and (marginally) smaller processor.
Plus, although we don't know the inner mechanics of it, we'd attest to BB7 being optimised to save power where it can. We're not talking Curve 8310 standards of yesterday, but it does put in an above-average performance.
Connectivity-wise, we have the usual suspects: HSDPA 3G and HSUPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. Bluetooth isn't just reserved for calls but also for streaming music wirelessly to our stereo via A2DP, which we were very happy with. The Wi-Fi signal was strong and we had no problems with the speeds of our Vodafone 3G signal.
Near-field communications (NFC) is the big plus on the BlackBerry Bold 9790. NFC is to phone operators now what integrated GPS was back in 2007.
All of the manufacturers are talking about it and telling us it's the future, yet BlackBerry is one of the first to bring it to market, which you have to commend it for. In theory, the technology will enable you to use your phone to pay for goods by touching them against a sensor.
NFC is taking a while to catch on and it's still only being used in a handful of places as an experiment. But having said that, Orange said it expects a huge increase in NFC handsets brought to market this year, so be assured, it's the future (and it would know, because it also told us it's bright).
