Anyone who is familiar with the BlackBerry devices of the past few years should immediately see similarities between the new Bold 9930 and RIM's original "Bold" smartphone, the . And that's for good reason. RIM basically took the best design elements of the Bold 9000 and combined them with a touch screen, trackpad, faster processor, a much thinner profile and a vastly improved software experience, to make the Bold 99xx.

About that processor: The Bold 9930 packs a 1.2GHz, single-core , which is significantly more powerful than the 624MHz processors found in the last generation of BlackBerrys. The processor, along with some software enhancements in BlackBerry 7, does speed up the overall UI and navigation experience, but I'm still not thrilled with this processor. (More on why in the next section.)

The new Bold packs more internal storage and RAM than any other BlackBerry, except the brand new Torch devices, with 8GB of built-in storage, expandable up to 40GB via microSD memory cards. It also features 768MB of RAM.

The Bold 9930 packs a pile of different wireless radios, which is definitely a boon for enterprise users. The unit I tested runs on Verizon's 3G CDMA network in the United States (dual-band 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EVDO Rev A), and in my experience, Verizon's network is one of if not the most reliable cellular networks where I live and in the areas in which I travel most frequently.

The Bold 9930 is also a "world phone," meaning it not only supports Verizon CDMA bands, but GSM/UMTS/HSPA bands so it can hop onto other networks, inside and outside of the United States, if necessary--of course, you'll need a SIM card and an active account with another carrier to use its network. (More specifically, the Bold 9930 supports dual-band 2100/900 MHz UMTS/HSPA, with maximum upload speeds of 5.76 Mbps and max downloads speeds of 14.4 Mbps; along with quad-band GSM/EDGE support for the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz frequencies.)