IT was more than a year ago when Research in Motion, or RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, in Canada, released the Blackberry Bold 9000, effectively serving notice to everyone that it was making a serious play at being more than providing excellent messaging solutions in rather, uhm, utilitarian-looking devices.

Big, black and beautiful, the Bold was a major aesthetic statement, a gleaming dark slab of wireless-communications technology that looked utterly in-the-moment, with a user interface that made a similarly bold statement with its decidedly stylized icons and stark color choices. Finally, users could indulge their messaging addiction without having to feel embarrassed about whipping out their Blackberry at some hip party.

Fast-forward to 2010 and RIM has just issued the second-generation Blackberry Bold 9700, which is not only a refinement of the best-selling original but, more important, also a more powerful device with a speedier processor, a bumped-up camera and an upgraded OS. The Bold 9700 will no doubt please Bold fans and those looking into that unique Blackberry messaging experience.

While the Bold 9700 retains much of the orginal’s styling—the piano black finish with discrete chrome accents—it feels much better to hold with a few millimeters shaved here and there. It now measures 109x60x14.1 mm (versus the 114x66x15 mm of the original), and gone is the awkward way the Bold 9000 rested in the hand with its girth. The more svelte, more compact form factor, of course, means lesser screen real estate and more cramped keys.

Which, by the way, isn’t to suggest that typing out short messages and longer e-mails on the Bold 9700 has gone south. Its 35-key full QWERTY keyboard remains a delight to use, the individual keys having been raised just a tad to increase usability and provide a springy feedback. Moreover, the second-generation Bold may have lost a few slivers of screen real estate for a more compact form factor but the smaller display packs in the same 65,000 colors resulting in images and text that look a lot sharper and more vibrant.

Besides the changes in physical dimensions for a more rewarding user experience, the Bold 9700 has tweaked the hardware toward the same end. Gone is the standard trackball and in its place is a marvelous optical trackpad that is super responsive and a joy to use. More significant, although the RIM web site lists the processor simply as a 624MHz chip, it could very well be the next-gen of the Intel XScale 624MHz that can be found in the original Bold. Whatever the case may be, the Bold 9700 performs significantly faster, nimbly switching through tasks and applications that should delight users. No doubt, the situation is also greatly helped by the fact that the built-in memory has been bumped up from the original’s 128MB RAM to 256MB. And from the original Bold’s 2-megapixel snapper, the 9700 packs a 3.2-megapixel camera that can capture still images and videos.

Also positively impacting the user experience is the BlackBerry OS 5.0 that ships with the Bold 9700, which brings notable enhancements to its messaging and calendar applications. For example, it is now much easier to create new appointments with drop-down list of entry options. Of course, there is the BlackBerry Internet Service, which allows access to as much as 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts, and Dataviz’s popular productivity suite Documents To Go now comes preloaded allowing the user to view and edit documents and spreadsheets even while in transit. Also preloaded, are instant-messaging clients for Google Talk, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Windows Live and BlackBerry Messenger.

Moreover, the OS’s built-in multimedia applications are still among the most robust in the smart-phone space, particularly in terms of format support out of the box, with support for DivX 4, DivX 5/6 (partial), XviD (partial), H.263, H.264, WMV3, MPEG4, Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6 (Flash support) for video, and 3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro, WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+ for audio. For the end-user, that means no more reencoding your existing digital files of favorite movies, TV shows, music videos and music into this supported format and that, a chore that you won’t even wish on your worst enemy.

And, yes, you can pack in more of your kind of entertainment-on-the-go with the Blackberry Bold 9700, as it comes with a microSD slot that currently tops off at 16GB, mitigating RIM’s jettisoning of the 1GB of storage bolted into the original Bold.

Beyond the applications built-in or preloaded onto the Bold 9700, there are hundreds more available on Blackberry App World, the official online repository for everything from productivity suites to tip calculators to games—and perhaps even a fart app hiding in there somewhere—extending the utility of the Bold 9700 and the fun to be had on it. Perusing all the goodies available on the Internet with this baby is, by the way, a zippy experience, packing as it does high-speed 3G and Wi-Fi technologies, along with Bluetooth 2.1 with mono/stereo headset support.

For all the refinements and enhancements that RIM’s software guys have shoehorned into Blackberry OS 5.0, however, it soon becomes obvious that the OS is in need of a major rewrite, as there are still one too many clicking through menus and submenus to accomplish tasks. This need becomes no more apparent than when you fire up the browser, which is way behind the usability and elegance of what is available on the iPhone, the Palm Pre and the dozens of Android devices now in the market. That much, RIM has acknowledged when it recently acquired Torch Mobile, which develops a WebKit-based browser, and signed up with Adobe’s Open Screen Project.

Still, those who place a premium on powerful messaging and calendar features will be hard-pressed to find a more compelling proposition than the Blackberry Bold 9700. Throw in the fact that it also runs forever—actually, its über-powerful battery provides enough juice for six hours of nonstop talk, which is a lot of talk—and is beautiful to hold and behold, and this second-gen Bold from the guys in Ontario is easily a winner.