The 8800 is good looking, if a little thick around the middle at 4.5 by 2.6 by 0.6 inches and has a truly gorgeous 320 by 240 screen. I thought the 8700's screen was nice, but wow – this may be the brightest handheld screen I've ever encountered. Also, like that of the BlackBerry Pearl, the screen brightness adjusts itself automatically depending on ambient light.
Keys on the device are relatively small and close together, but parts of the buttons are carved out so you can feel spaces between the keys. After two weeks of use, I found the keyboard to be as good as possible given the device's size: it's more usable than the cramped Palm Treo keyboard, but not as spacious as the old, even wider Blackberrys.
As a phone, calls are loud enough, with quite a sharp, trebly sound in both the earpiece and speakerphone. Reception is very good. You can assign any song in the device as a ringtone. This is a world roaming phone, so I took it to Spain. While there it worked extremely well, with both voice and data, once I ironed out some plan problems with Cingular. The phone's slow EDGE modem has one big advantage. I measured double the battery life of faster 3G handhelds, with an amazing 15 hours of talk time and 2-3 days of heavy e-mail use.
I hooked up a Plantronics Voyager 510 mono headset without a problem, and I was able to initiate VoiceSignal voice dialing through the headset. A Plantronics Pulsar 590 stereo headset, on the other hand, couldn't launch voice dialing, and there's no stereo Bluetooth music support here anyway. If I were you I'd stick to mono.
Software-wise, it's a BlackBerry through and through, meaning it is stable, smooth, fast and easy-to-use. RIM adds TeleNav GPS and music and video players (but not a camera) to the traditional e-mail, PIM, and Web functions. The GPS acquired a signal startlingly quickly, but I found maps took a very long time to load over the stuttering EDGE cellular connection. Third-party applications designed for the 8700 series, such as Opera Mini and WorldMate Professional, may not work with the PC-based installer but download and run fine if you download them directly to the device.
E-mail functions are the same as on the Pearl, and you can't underestimate the joy of being able to scroll horizontally with that little trackball. I integrated Yahoo! Mail, POP3, and Outlook Web Access accounts quickly and easily from a Web interface. While the 8800, like the Pearl, can view JPEG attachments and listen to sound attachments, Microsoft Office and PDF attachments come through in a stripped-down form.
As usual, you sync the 8800 with a PC using RIM's BlackBerry Desktop program, or the free PocketMac for BlackBerry on Macs. BlackBerry Desktop has some trouble installing on Vista systems – rather than running the auto-extracting install program, you have to use WinZip to manually extract the installer into a folder on your desktop and then run the installer. It then works in Windows Vista.
The phone's music and video players rely on a MicroSD memory card stuck inconveniently under the back cover. You load songs by dragging and dropping on your PC, by using RIM's included Media Manager copying software, or by using the third-party TunesSync for BlackBerry. Loading 400 MB of music took us 26 minutes, or an average of 15 MB/minute. That translates into 20 seconds to load an average song, a typically slow USB 1.1 speed. The music player organizes MP3, AAC and WMA songs by folder, displaying song titles and artists but not letting you sort by them. Songs sounded good through the built-in mono speaker or through a wired headset.
A third-party freeware solution, BlackBerry Video Creator from Seabyrd Technology, helps reformat PC and DVD videos for the device. The video player, which plays MP4 and WMV videos, looks sharp but has the same annoying navigation problem as the Pearl's player did – if you're watching a 45 minute show, you can only step through in increments of two to three minutes.
Unlike on the Pearl, there's no camera, but this is typical for more work-oriented devices. I wasn't too bothered by the absence.
The BlackBerry 8800 is missing one key power user feature: 3G high-speed or Wi-Fi wireless. While the phone's EDGE connection is fine for e-mail, Web browsing on high-speed devices like the Samsung Blackjack or even RIM's own BlackBerry 8703e is immeasurably easier. High-speed wireless also makes a power user device much more useful as a PC modem. While the 8800 plugs along at 100 kbps/sec on EDGE, owners of Samsung BlackJacks are cruising at 500 kbps/sec with HSDPA.
If ease of use and e-mail are paramount in your world, the 8800 is the ultimate device at the moment, and the music and video players are just good enough to be fun. But power users may lean towards the Samsung BlackJack instead, with its higher-speed modem and better music and video syncing with Windows Media Player.
The BlackBerry 8800 is available on Cingular for $299.99 with a two-year contract. RIM typically releases all of its form factors on all US wireless carriers within about a year of their first release, so you should expect to see this trickle down to other carriers as well with time.
SPEC DATA :
- Service Provider: AT&T
- Operating System: BlackBerry OS
- Screen Size: 2.5 inches
- Screen Details: 320x240, 65k-color screen
- Camera: No
- Flash Memory Type: Micro SD
- Bluetooth: Yes
- Web Browser: Yes
- Network: GSM
- Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
- High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE
- Special Features: Music
- Notes: $299.99 with two-year contract
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