Jengates Blog

As a Christmas present to myself, I bought the new Blackberry. I actually bought in early December, so I’ve had it for almost a month. Here is my report:

This device is so much better than the Blackberry 7100t that I had prior to this. I ditched T-Mobile in favor of Cingular just so I could have this device.

Here are the things that I like:

* Much better sound quality for me and for the people on the other end of the call. With the 7100t, I had lots of complaints about people hearing static or garbled speech. The 8700c does not suffer from this problem.

* Much better communication with my Bluetooth devices. For some reason the 7100t did not work well with my Bluetooth headset and speakerphone. The 8700c does!

* Much faster everything. The 8700c has a much faster processor and there is no “lag” when browsing emails or jumping from screen to screen. The web browsing is much faster as well.

* The keyboard is larger and easier to type on than the 7100t. The 7100 had a keyboard which had multiple letters on each key…more like a standard phone keypad, with a letters overlayed like a full keyboard. It wasn’t like typing on a regular phone, but it isn’t as easy as the new 8700 keyboard. The area where you notice the benefit of this keyboard the most is when you are typing URLs or email addresses. It is much better.

* The screen is bigger and brighter and easier to see in sunlight.

* It doesn’t crash like the 7100t. It also doesn’t drop calls.

Some things I don’t like.

* Cingular is more expensive than T-mobile. You can only get this phone from Cingular right now but I Cingular might be worth it. So far I have had a good experience with them and the extra expense may be worth it.

Wheny you buy a Blackberry from Cingular, you have to buy a phone plan, plus a blackberry plan so it drives up the cost.

For those of you who have never used a Blackberry, it is a fantastic device. It’s really a business tool…not a toy. It doesn’t have alot of the toys that the Treo has…like no camera, no MP3s, etc. But it does have a great interface and almost perfect integration with Exchange server. I am hooked.

For those of you who have or do use a Blackberry, I highly recommend the new 8700c. It is almost perfect.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.