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As you may have guessed, the Bold 2 9700 is continuing with RIM's new plan to make its BlackBerry range less of a 'work only, serious face' device and more of a 'wow, isn't my outside life fun too, I want to share that with my BlackBerry!'
Clues to that effect are the converged media sector on the new 2 9700 (whereas before Music was a separate and aloof function) and the 3.5mm headphone jack, which makes listening to things on the go so much easier.
Music
The music player on the BlackBerry range has always been slightly ahead of the curve, meaning that whatever has been necessary to make listening to MP3s on your phone palatable has been used.
There's no great secret feature to the music player on the BlackBerry 2 9700, but all the functions you'd hope for are there: shuffle, repeat, playlists and categorising by album/artist etc.
There's also the menu option to stream the songs out to a Bluetooth headset – we used stereo A2DP Jabra Halo headphones and not only was connection faultless, there appeared to be little sound depreciation as well.
Couple that with a nice-looking album art displaying interface, and it's perfectly feasible the MP3 player on the 2 9700 could replace an MP3 player, providing you use a big enough microSD card.
And beyond the simple MP3, there's also support for WMA and AAC+ t00, so you won't be hamstrung by that many incompatible file types.
Video
In the same vein as music, the video player on the Bold 2 9700 does just what it needs to without being fancy.
Whether you can watch that many videos on a 2.4-inch screen, we don't know, but we do know that the shrunken proportions and increased resolution make video look sumptuous on this phone.
We tried watching a full length movie on the phone, but not only were we conscious the whole time of people wondering why we were staring a BlackBerry so intently for such a long period of time, but the screen sometimes lost details of the film simply down to its size.
In terms of compatibility, we're seeing DivX/WMV/XviD/3gp codecs all supported, although XviD only 'partially' for some reason. Perhaps it will only play the first half of any video or something.
Picture gallery
As we mentioned before, RIM has ramped up the processor on this phone and that's never as obvious as when looking through media files.
Despite having a fairly full 8GB microSD card on board, the Bold 2 9700 showed only the merest hint of slowdown before powering through its tasks – thumbnails for photos displayed in milliseconds rather than having to wait an age.
Scrolling through and opening them for editing was also simple as well – it's something we keep coming back to but the simplicity of this BlackBerry Bold 2 9700 is what makes it so compelling at times.
Other nice features in the media section include a voice recorder with apparently no limit on how much sound can be recorded in one sitting, and voice notes so you don't have to write down that important plotline you just thought of for that novel you're never going to write.
