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But while the Bold 9900 won't be boasting about its stills snapper, at least it can about the video recorder. Because this baby comes equipped with a HD video snapper.
Whereas before users could only shoot in a maximum VGA resolution (640 x 480), now, by default, the Bold 9780 will happily film away in glorious 1280 x 720.
Videos shot in good light came out well. When you go from light to darkness, it copes admirably and fixes the shot as appropriate. But in dark settings, you'll have to turn the light on, otherwise you may as well forget it. This is no great surprise and we can't hold it against RIM.
What we can hold against the company, though, is the act of turning that light on, because it's all a bit of a pain.
Despite there being a shortcut on the screen, our unit didn't actually let us click it. So we had to go into the options, tick to turn the light on, accept the mandatory warning that the light will use battery life, click save, go back and start recording again. Worse, that process automatically ends your recording, which is annoying.
We can't help feeling that if RIM had spent more time concentrating on getting these little things right and less time on banging on about processors and the new OS, the video app could have been much better.
As it is, although the video is HD, the actual experience is only really adequate. Interestingly, files are encoded as 3GP rather than the MPEG format we'd have expected.
And you'll have to email all videos to share them via direct messages, because a good 30 seconds worth of footage will be around 40MB (way above the 300k limit most operators impose on MMS.) Alternatively, you could transfer them via the cable or use an app such as Dropbox. At least you're presented with various options.
