First Kevin got his hands on the BlackBerry Bold 9000 off eBay and put it through its crazy paces over at CrackBerry.com. If you want to know all about the BB Bold, definitely head over to their BlackBerry Bold page for more info than you'll find anywhere else. Next we headed over to the iPhone blog to pit the Blackberry Bold vs. the iPhone, complete with video. Sure, over there it's the iPhone blog, so it's natural that I would accentuate the iPhone there. Yet, there was another reason I didn't dig too deeply into the Bold.

Now we come full circle and the BlackBerry Bold has landed here at WMExperts. Here's that other reason: the Bold is busted. We've told you before that there are potential downsides to using a Network Operations Center (a NOC) to funnel all of your email and most of your data and apps (Beyond the BlackBerry downtime, that is). Add another issue to that list: RIM can (and did) shut down a PIN via their NOC. So what we have here is a BlackBerry Bold that can't email or do any apps that require the NOC or a PIN (like web browsing without WiFi and installing many apps). A BlackBerry that can't do email ain't no kind of BlackBerry at all.

So while we could do a full-on smackdown of the features that do, it wouldn't end up being much different from our previous look at the BlackBerry during the Smartphone Round Robin (First Look at the BB 8310 and Final thoughts on the same). Since we aren't Crackberry addicts, we wouldn't notice too many OS updates beyond the the Bold's updated eye candy, and there's plenty of that in Kevin's articles.

So instead we'll just keep it simple: after the break find a gigantic pile of comparison shots pitting the BlackBerry Bold up against ten different Windows Mobile devices.

(p.s. We may have this for a few days so if there's anything specific you're interested in knowing about, post questions in the comments!)

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After all the HTC and Treo 800w craziness last week, it might be difficult to believe that there are, you know, other platforms out there. Inferior platforms, of course, but out there nonetheless. So while we here at WMExperts were busy scooping Treo 800w news left and right, our sister site CrackBerry.com had what, we have to admit, was a full week of the top smartphone scoopage anywhere on the internet. They had a pre-release unit of what turned out to be the BlackBerry Bold, aka the BlackBerry 9000.

The 9000, as we ruefully admitted last week, is hawt. A 480x320 screen, a very fast (for a BlackBerry, at least) processor, GPS, WiFi, 3G, the works. It even has a Gig of on-board storage.

This week is also going to be a big one for CrackBerry.com as they cover WES2008, a big ol' BlackBerry convention with a special focus on the Corporate crowd. Yours-truly will actually be helping out at the convention, so posting might come in short bursts and odd times here on WMExperts, just FYI.

Meanwhile, one of our other sister sites had a big announcement of its own: The iPhone Blog Merges with Phone Different.

The merger means a new design and new features for those crazy iPhone folks. It also means a little less of their trash-talk in our own forums, but that's ok because we can still take it to them directly: head on over to The iPhone Blog and tell 'em you'd rather have an HTC Diamond.