Hello,

I have made these quick observations about BlackBerry Bold Browser:

Spin trackball
Move mouse cursor. Diagonal movements work properly, unlike in Opera Mini. Faster trackball spins move the mouse pointer incredibly fast (pointer acceleration). It finally feels like a true mouse pointer now, and feels much better than previous mouse pointer in Desktop browsing mode on Pearl and Curve.

Click trackball
Zoom into webpage (until fully zoomed in)

ALT + Click trackball
Zoom out of webpage

SHIFT + Spin trackball
Fast panning around the web page

Adjust mouse pointer speed
I noticed that it was a little obscure to adjust the mouse pointer speed -- it is adjusted in Settings -> Screen/Keyboard (I use 90% sensitivity for horizontal and vertical, I prefer this over the 70% default)

Adjust the amount of zooming before you can edit textboxes, etc
Go into Browser Options, and change font size to a smaller font size such as about 3 or 4. That way, you don't have to zoom in as much before you're allowed to edit text in textboxes. You are allowed to use font sizes as small as 1.

Other observations: On the BlackBerry Bold's high resolution screen, I was even able to just about barely read font size point 1 and 2, which is much more readable than Opera Mini's unreadable zoomed-out fonts. Many AJAX pages don't yet work properly, such as Google Maps (full version), GMAIL (full version), Sprint Captioned Telephone, etc. GMAIL light version worked though. Lots more webpages seem to work properly than on previous BlackBerries, and seems to preferable to Opera Mini on first sight (once optimized, and learning curve for new keypress shortcuts completed). The new browser appears to show a lot of promise. Performance during heavy Javascript processing should not cause the device to freeze or menus to be sluggish -- i.e. loading Google Maps and then later trying to access BlackBerry Bold's menus. With this page, it grinds to a laggy crawl with the spinning watch (the Bold equivalent of the hourglass)

Thanks Mark. Where did you pick up a BOLD? Is it available in Canada yet?

great info mark, thanks. how do you get this awesome info?

I was able to hold two different BlackBerry Bold's recently in two different locations. Not mine. (I wish!)

It seems they are starting to pop up everywhere in the right hands, from celebs to VIP's, cellphone dealer personal devices, and more. So this is hardly top secret information anymore, given the information flow that's been happening...

I have to add, I'm also going to have an iPhone 3G too -- due to my field of work, I program C/C++/C#/Java for a variety of smartphones -- BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and yes - iPhone. Multiplatform mobile developer.

At HowardForums, you can already send PM's to quite a lot of people asking about their BlackBerry Bold and their capabilities. So if you're intensely curious about a specific feature...

We are all VIPs Mark. No human being is more important than another human being. Don't ever forget that!

During cellphone launches, there is quite a bit of preferential treatment apparently -- witness the Rogers launch events, for example.

Wouldn't mind being a kick-ass beta tester for RIM otherwise...
(Though I'd be under NDA -- understandably!)

Looking forward to the Bold!

Any particular reason you cant do this here? I havent seen anything stopping anyone.

You don't need to change the forum to ask your Bold questions! Come and ask me your questions, I have a BlackBerry Bold.

Now that Bold is released --
Any other Bold Browser observations?

Mark,
Have you had any luck using the Bold as a modem for your laptop? With 3G as compared to poky edge it might make using a blackberry as a moden very useful.