The BlackBerry Bold 9780 is boring, but in a good way. It’s a smartphone of simple pleasures: clear calls, solid syncing, and sharp Web pages. it fits in your pocket well and you won’t need to charge it too often. if your cell phone needs tend more towards no-nonsense than glamorous, it’s worth a look if you’re a T-Mobile subscriber.

Design, Features, and Voice Performance Cute, sturdy, and well-balanced at 4.3 by 2.4 by .6 inches (HWD) and 4.2 ounces, the BlackBerry Bold 9780 is made of black plastic with a textured back. the screen resolution of 360 by 480 doesn’t sound that high, but it’s very sharp on a tiny 2.4-inch panel. E-mail fonts, especially, look gorgeous. the 9780′s sculpted keypad is easy to type on, though it isn’t as great as the earlier BlackBerry Curve keyboard. Since the phone doesn’t have a touch screen, you navigate with a trackpad; the trackpad starts out a little twitchy, but you can change its sensitivity in settings.

RF reception was just average in my tests, but voice quality on the Bold 9780 was excellent. the earpiece is loud and clear; ditto for the speakerphone. on the other side of a call, background noise came through, but not enough to occlude my voice. the BlackBerry paired easily with an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars), including triggering voice dialing.

The 9780 features Wi-Fi calling, and the implementation on T-Mobile’s BlackBerries is higher quality, but less flexible than on Android phones. I’ve found calls made over Wi-Fi on BlackBerries to be clearer than calls on Android phones, and BlackBerries can roam between Wi-Fi and cellular without dropping a call, which Android devices can’t do. But I couldn’t figure out how to manually switch over to Wi-Fi mode if there was also a cellular connection available; the phone’s automatic switching was unpredictable.

Battery life is always a high point for RIM devices. I was able to achieve 10 hours, 42 minutes in my talk time test, which implies to me that the phone dropped from 3G into EDGE mode at some point, but BlackBerries always sip power. More importantly, you can easily get more than a day’s worth of standby time with this phone.

OS and Software This model is T-Mobile’s first BlackBerry to ship with the new BlackBerry 6 OS. the 9780 uses a 624MHz processor, which runs the OS speedily. the most notable change from earlier models is a much better Web browser, which can handle complex desktop Web pages. No, it doesn’t have Flash like the T-Mobile myTouch 4G ($199, 4.5 stars), but pages came up sharp, clear and accurate.

Messaging is a strength here, of course, but there’s one big caveat. BlackBerry phones merge several e-mail accounts, Twitter and Facebook into a single inbox and contact list, along with combining Google and Facebook calendars. But if you’re a Microsoft Exchange e-mail user, you can’t get over-the-air contact and calendar syncing unless your company’s IT department installs a BlackBerry server. You also can’t combine a locally synced Exchange calendar with an over-the-air Google calendar. This means consumer Exchange support is inferior to almost all Android and Apple phones, and that’s something to watch out for.

BlackBerry App World on the 9780 shows a few thousand apps, far below the number available on Android and Apple phones. the 9780 comes loaded with a couple of games, Microsoft Office document readers, and IM clients. GPS service comes from BlackBerry Maps, which locked into my position quickly and accurately; you can also download Google Maps. Because of the 9780′s common resolution and lack of a touch screen, I’m pretty sure almost anything that runs on earlier BlackBerry Bold models will run here.

I get a lot of reader e-mails from people who want to sync their smartphone with address books and calendars stored on computers, rather than “in the cloud.” That’s very difficult with Android phones, but it’s easy with the BlackBerry 9780. RIM’s BlackBerry Desktop suite is a real gem; not only does it sync locally with Outlook on PCs and Entourage and iCal on Macs, it syncs and reformats music and video files on your computer into the right shape and size for your BlackBerry as well.

Multimedia and Conclusions the BlackBerry 9780 comes with about 300MB of free storage, along with an 8GB MicroSD card tucked into a slot under the back cover. if you like to sync music and video with your PC or Mac, you’ve got it made here; the BlackBerry Desktop software syncs with iTunes libraries and transcodes various video formats, and the phone itself syncs with Windows Media Player. Music sounded clear and videos looked sharp, if quite small and cramped on the 2.4-inch screen. Videos from the YouTube Web site also play in full-screen mode, but there’s no T-Mobile TV or Netflix for the BlackBerry platform yet.

In my tests, the 5-megapixel camera was, well, moody. it takes a few seconds after starting up to gauge exposure properly; if you take your picture too quickly, it may be very dark. once it starts up, though, subsequent pictures can be snapped very quickly. Images tend to be very soft for 5-megapixel shots, and show considerable blur in low light. I got better results with the video mode, which took sharp 640×480 videos at 30 frames per second outdoors, and 24 frames per second indoors.

On T-Mobile, the 9780′s most direct competitor is RIM’s own BlackBerry Curve 3G 9300 ($49.99, 4 stars), which costs $70 less and gets a slightly higher rating because of its lower price. the 9300′s camera is a lower-res two megapixels, but the 9780′s camera is no shining star even at five megapixels. the 9300 comes with the earlier BB OS 5, but RIM swears an OS 6 upgrade is coming soon. the Curve actually has a better keyboard than the 9780, but the 9780′s sharp screen makes reading text easy on the eyes.

The 9780 is a solid little device that does what it does, and does it well. But it’s missing three things that make it fall short of other flagship smartphones. One is a huge lineup of third-party apps. the second is solid consumer Microsoft Exchange support, and that particular flaw is what knocks the 9780 down from a solid four-star rating. the final missing factor is intangible—the big-screen flash and fun that come from competitors’ gesture-happy, touch-focused interfaces. if you have iPhone envy, this isn’t the phone for you. But if you just want something that fits in your pocket and syncs with your PC, BlackBerry Bold 9780 could be it.

Compare the BlackBerry Bold 9780 with several other mobile phones side by side.

More Cell Phone Reviews: •   Motorola Citrus (Verizon Wireless)•   LG Octane (Verizon Wireless)•   Bose Bluetooth Headset•   BlackBerry Bold 9780 (T-Mobile)•   LG Optimus T (T-Mobile)•   more