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The basic music application appears to be mostly unchanged from other 'Berries. It lets you select from the songs, artists, genres, albums, playlists, etc. There is an equalizer available for users to alter the sound, You have to hit the BlackBerry key to find it, under the options selection. It offers 12 equalizer pre-sets to adjust the sound to your tastes. You can also turn an audio boost function on and off. This raises the maximum volume of playback. The EQ and audio boost function both go a long way to making the 9700 one of the best-sounding 'Berries I've reviewed.

The player user interface itself is no more impressive than the Storm2's. You can play or pause/stop the music with the optical mouse, as well as skip forward and backward tracks. As with most media players, a progress bar shows you how much of the song remains, and album art is displayed if it is tagged to the song. Again, the BlackBerry key pulls up a big menu of options that can be altered during playback, such as sending the music to a Bluetooth headset, setting the current song as a ringtone, and others.

Music can be side-loaded directly onto a microSD card. It can also be drag-and-dropped through mass storage mode. Lastly, Mac users can now use the new BlackBerry Desktop Manager to sync music and playlists. It works wonderfully well, and is a breeze to figure out.

For the adventurous, third-party applications such as Pandora and Slacker can enrich the music experience by creating personal radio stations. I like the Slacker app because it can cache much on the microSD card for playback when the device is disconnected from the network (i.e., on an airplane).

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