The screen is bright and vibrant though, with the BlackBerry 5 OS working nicely with a good layout. The home screen isn't going to be anything new to BB fans, but at least the new user will be able to work out what's going on instantly.

One nice element to the Bold 9700 is the 624MHz processor under the hood - it's not in the same league as the Snapdragon 1GHz from Qualcomm but the interface really zips along with the new Bold.

Google Maps was very quick to load up for instance, and generally opening and shutting applications was as fast as you can hope for, with the little pausing timer icon a rarity to see.

And while the screen may have been reduced to 2.44-inches for the Bold 9700, video looks phenomenal and high resolution, despite only being HVGA in terms of the number of pixels.

Overall, we were impressed with the new Bold 9700 - it's not a game changer by any stretch of the imagination for RIM, but the company has built a reputation on slowly releasing ever better handsets (with the Storm perhaps an exception, although the new release does go some way to tempering that).

Given a UK release date for the start of November, we're awaiting news of which vendors will be carrying it, with O2 reportedly at the head of the queue.