Pros & Cons
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- First Blackberry with full keyboard, music player and trackball.
- Built-in GPS.
- Blackberry e-mail is still unmatched in ease of use and flexibility of merging many accounts.
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- No 3G.
- No stereo Bluetooth.
BlackBerry 8800 Specs
| Screen Size | 2.5 |
BlackBerry handhelds traditionally help business people get things done, and the new BlackBerry 8800 does this better than ever. The 8800 brings
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
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
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
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
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.
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 15 hours 19 minutes
Jbenchmark 1: 1761
Jbenchmark 2: 89
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Final Thoughts
BlackBerry 8800
A tremendously effective messaging phone, the 8800 adds a trackball and music player to the traditional Blackberry form factor. But the lack of 3G high-speed wireless will be an issue for Web surfers and laptop modem users.