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The Reviews are in and the Bold 9000 SmartPhone By Blackberry wins hands down.

The screen is just stunning, wider and taller than the Curve and even prettier than the 8800. Technically, the screen resolution is twice the resolution of the Curve and it is obvious when you see it and apparent when compared side by side.

The speaker phone and stereo speakers are actually too loud and the speaker rivals Logitech MM22 Portable Speakers for iPod my external iPod speakers.

The speaker phone (often cited as a Blackberry weakness) is fixed, we were in a conference room and experimented by using the BB 9000 speaker phone instead of our US Robotics tripod phone and the Bold worked just as well.

The Operating System interface is familiar to existing BB users and photos attached inside emails can be viewed as appendments or inline items instead of being opened in the pic viewer.

The OS and applications are blatantly faster than the Curve or 8800’s, the improved CPU is especially apparent when using the spell checker.

The gapless keyboard is real Blackberry perfection, myself and other BB complain about the 8800 keyboard and how easy it is to double hit letters or fat finger the adjacent keys.

Curves and most other BB’s have spaced keyboards and are excellent for fast typing and the 8800 and earlier Pearl gapless keyboards resulted in howls of pain from the user community.

Rim improved on the Bold my elevating the pitch of the scalloped keys on the Bold, in short it means they’ve made it harder to fat finger and double hit keys and the keys are the best feeling Blackberry keystrokes I’ve used.

The camera doesn’t seem much better than the camera in the Curve, and the brighter screen drinks the battery while supporting up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. The flash and video functions are rudimentary and shouldn’t be used for indoor or cozy light settings.

The camera does include geotagging capabilities to imprint the location coordinates into the photo data, and it works fairly well indoors. Geostamping is an expensive feature found on newer Nikon cameras and very few cell phones. Earlier Pearl models with cameras didn’t include Geotagging as standard but after market add ons and Rim’s adoption of the functionality remains in the Bold 9000.

The browser is excellent and has native support for Adobe Flash so you can watch YouTube videos when you have nothing else better to do, the pocket versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are surprisingly decent for a mobile device and even better than the versions included with Windows Mobile / Pocket PC.

NOTE: The MicroSD slot can be sticky and almost impossible to remove the card after the spring eject. Sometimes we have to use tweezers to remove the MicroSD and this is hazardous since the top portion of the SD card is where the flash data chip resides and can be destroyed if handled poorly. We are able to use 8GB cards from different manufacturers w/o any compatibility issues.

The WiFi LAN speed is comparable to any other PC but it didn’t seem faster than using AT&T’s 3G over the air network.

Be prepared to be interrupted by strangers and BB lovers who want to know more about it, I’ve been approached by more strangers than the tour guide at the Heffner mansion.

Whether or not you’re an existing Blackberry user, you’ll be impressed by the Bold.