PDAStreet: Hardware Reviews: Review: BlackBerry 8800

I'm a fan, though not a regular user, of Research in Motion's BlackBerry technology. For my money, RIM still does mobile e-mail better than anyone else, and Web browsing almost as well as the Windows Mobile competition. Now with the BlackBerry 8800, the company's latest PDA phone, RIM has hit a grand slam.

The big innovation is a built-in GPS receiver, turn-by-turn navigation software from TeleNav Inc. and BlackBerry Maps, which makes the 8800 a supremely useful tool for travelers of all kinds. This product also sports an elegantly slim industrial design that echoes some of the features of the splashy Pearl 8100, the phone-shaped device RIM introduced earlier this year.

A quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone, the 8800 is available in the U.S. from Cingular for $300 (with a two-year voice contract and rebate). In Canada, Rogers has it priced from $500 to $650 CDN depending on service contract.

I tested the Cingular version while traveling on vacation for two weeks. The GPS functionality was a huge time and hassle saver, although it's not perfect. Our group became very familiar with Miss BlackBerry, as we jokingly referred to the simulated voice used by the TeleNav software.

Under the hood, the 8800 features a 312 MHz XScale processor, 64MB of flash memory and expandable memory in the form of a microSD slot. The 1400 mAhr removable/rechargeable lithium cell has a rated life of 300 minutes talk time and 22 days standby time. I never had power problems even when using the navigation software all day. The 8800 also has a Bluetooth radio for connecting headsets.

The form factor is closer to traditional BlackBerry PDAs than the Pearl, and it has a full QWERTY thumb-keyboard. But the 8800 is narrower and thinner than past PDA models - 4.49 x 2.60 x 0.55 inches, 4.73 oz - and uses the Pearl's tiny but very effective trackball for navigating menus and Web pages. It also features a Pearl-like piano black and silver finish.

The keyboard and individual keys are also commensurately smaller than on past models and that can be a problem for the fat fingered and those with less than 20:20 vision. I found keying in numbers when using the phone to be excruciatingly slow. This is definitely not your aged father's cell phone - in more ways than one.

The numeric keypad is inset at the left-hand side of the QWERTY keyboard, with the W, E, R, S, D, F, Z, X and C keys doubling as number keys. Besides the letter keys, there's an ALT key that you need to hold down to type numbers in all other applications except the phone, plus Delete (Backspace) and Enter keys, two shift keys for typing upper case letters, and a symbol key that lets you input symbols, including those featured as ALT values on the letter keys and others.

Above the keyboard are larger dedicated Talk and End keys, and Menu and Back keys on either side of the trackball.

The TFT color LCD is excellent, though slightly smaller than on some other recent BlackBerry PDA phones. It measures about 2.5 inches diagonally, with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, and supports over 65,000 colors. Even when using the navigation software, which typically benefits from a bigger screen, I never had trouble reading from this screen.

It also has the light-sensing technology introduced in BlackBerry models a year or so ago that adjusts the LCD brightness to the amount of ambient light.

On the 8800's razor-thin left-hand edge, there's a Push-to-Talk (PTT) button (though Cingular isn't currently offering the PTT service), as well as USB and headphone jacks. On the right-hand edge, there are volume up and down keys.