Bullet proof eMail on the go (Blackberry 8700g)

Member Name: ManicMorFF

Product:	Blackberry 8700g
Date:	25/05/09 (54 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It does what it says on the tin

Disadvantages: No camera, little bit bulky

I have a Blackberry 8700g for work use, by that I mean issued by my employer for business use. This means that unfortunately I cannot pass opinion here on device costs or tariffs.

That said, this device is a fantastic handset. It's pretty much bulletproof in terms of stability; I think I've had to battery-out reset it only once in six months of pretty-much continuous use.

I use it heavily for eMail (I receive around 150-250 eMails per day on average). I do a lot of eMail handling using my desktop PC but whioe on the move and attending meetings it's invaluable. It allows me to respond quickly to questions and keep things ticking over when I'm not at my desk.

I am on the Vodafone network with the Blackberry and my own personal phone and find that I consistently get a better signal on the Blackberry.

Call quality is clear and it has a speaker facility, which means you can use it as an impromptu conference call device.

The colour screen and is crisp and clear and I find very easy to read. The user interface is very easy to get the hang of, which most things driven from the scroll-wheel on the right hand side of the device.

The keyboard looks like it has very small keys, and it has, but even with grown-up fingers like mine, I managed to get the hang of double-thumb typing fairly quickly. One tip - look up and learn the keyboard shortcuts if you want to save yourself some time scrolling through lots of eMails - 'T' & 'B' for top and bottom, and 'N' and 'P' for next and previous saves you jumping in and out of eMails. there are others, but it depends what you need to save time on really.

Battery life is good and even after having the phone for six months I get up to 4 days out of it between charges and that's with reasonably heavy usage.

There is a wealth of applications you can download to the device but I only use two regularly;
1. MSN Messenger, which is a good implementation of the desktop application and saves time when playing eMail pingpong when on the go and
2. TwitterBerry, which is a reasonably featured Twitter client - there are probably some better featured clients out there, but this one does the job just fine for me.

Drawbacks;
It's not very good at formatting emails containing tables and I'm not particularly impressed with the attached document handling in eMail, but I may just be a bit fussy on that front. But I'm happy to live with that and my guys know to down-tech their eMails for Blackberry viewing if need be.
Also, no camera, so limits your Twitter activity to text only.
A little bit bulky, but you kind of expect that from this purpose kind of device, could be a bit thinner and maybe a little narrower, but I guess RIM have addressed that criticism with their newer models.

Summary: Wouldn't be without it

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