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Rating: 
Summary: A Better Mousetrap?
Review: After turning in my original Blackberry for the new Blueberry, I am very impressed by the new added features. When deciding to covert, my main goal was to rid my beltline from two geeky units to a single tactical device. I have been trying go "ONE" with the home theatre/DVD/VCR/Sony/CD/Tivo/Ceiling Fan units for 5+ years and still not there. So for those of you wanting to give up one of those two belt barnicles, I would vote for the Blackberry 8270. It has a superior e-mail client, calendar interface, Memo Pad, views office attachments, WEB connectivity and SDK platform for Java-applications. It is an adequate phone but lacks native features of Nokia phones like, one touch dialing, voice recognition, speed dilaing capabilities. Howevere, it offers superior global coverage for US and INTL locations, thus allowing me to quit taking yet another phone while I travel abroad. A slight downside is the minute keypad and it is hard to find the numerics at night, without glasses, or while driving when you need too. If you have a password to unlock, which our company requires for security, you might want to use a sequence that can be easily entered if you cannot see the keyboard clearly. The address book allows for an infinite number of contacts with multiple phone numbers. Downloading to Outlook or Lotus Notes was easy and allows you to safely know that if it gets run over by a truck, your 500 entries can be re-downloaded to the replacement without any pain. The USB connection with the power adapter and data ports is brilliant. The color display is outstanding, although I would have made the screen larger for the aging eyes. I have seen several 3rd party software companies offering many programs for extending the functionality of the device, as well as a full size keyboard for quick data entry at a airport lounge for e-mail. My vote is to replace your old blackberry and toss the old digital phone in the river or donate to a worthy cause. Life is too short to have more than one device provide for your mobile life.
Rating: 
Summary: Great email, so-so phone
Review: First the good points. For email connectivity it's replaced my laptop/Outlook combo as the emailing method of choice. I haven't logged on to Outlook in weeks and have no immediate plans to change. The speakerphone is outstanding compared to my previous Samsung 4500 so no complaints there. Next the problems. I drive upwards of 400miles per month and spend the bulk of my time behind the wheel. The phone is not road-warrior friendly. Simply adding voice dialing would alleviate my problems with the phone design--there is no voice dialing, speed dialing is awkward, typing names to look up while driving is downright dangerous because the keyboard is so small it requires an undue amount of attention lest you mispell. And every time I use the phone, it feels like holding a deck of cards up to my face. The provided earpiece works but tends to pick up road noise in the vehicle. As for email connectivity, the $49/mo plan for unlimited email and web works fine but as a cell phone I find certain features lacking. Basic phone features are primitive; call in/out lists remembers the last 30 calls but no timestamps. Or if you want time stamps, it gets mixed in with your EMAIL messages. Other quirks include no internet access while on the phone so if I'm spending 20min on call to 3rd lvl tech support, I will miss any internet based alerts (our field paging system is a java app running on the Blackberry). This quirk may not be present with other cell phone providers.
Rating: 
Summary: Blackberry 7280- First Impressions
Review: If you want to save time, then you can stop here: It's amazing! with a few wrinkles and surprises Long version: This is currently the optimium tool for a road warrior-- combining PDA, cell phone, address book and agenda into one very cleverly designed package. My review does not comment on the 7280 phone capabilities as my tight-fisted company limits most mobile phone users to TDMA networks (for fear of international roaming charges). Since my customers expect communications on Internet time and the Luddite decision mill grinds ever so slowly at work I took the plunge on my own nickel... Color screen.... very sharp. The brighter the ambient lighting the better the legibility and clarity. Under low-light conditions the backlighting provides sufficient lighting of the display and keyboard. Brightness and contrast cannot be changed but font style and size can be easily modified Battery life.....Amazing! The system can be programmed to autohibernate at night during sleep hours for battery conservation. In addition the supplied holster has a small metal piece embedded in it which allows the display to turn-off further conserving battery power (the refrigerator door light trick gone high tech). The unit can be charged through a USB cable from a laptop or from a supplied international voltage wall charger using a swappable USB cable. People claim 7-10 days from a full charge and this would not surprise me if you keep it holstered when not in use. Audible ringtones and vibrate functionalities are programmable and are different depending on whether it is holstered/cradled or on a desk (so flashing light and vibrate when holstered but only flashing light when out of the holster). Again- very clever functionality. HTML surfing.... since this is a personal unit and am not using enterprise Blackberry servers the Internet functionality was very very limited out of the box through ATT Wireless. Downloading REQWIRELESS Webviewer provided the capability I was expecting for an additional $30. Webviewer requires Service Pack 2 for the Blackberry Desktop Messenger The plastic holster provided with the unit has a very smart ratcheting design of the belt clip. The unit can be swiveled and ratcheted to be held in a horizontal position -Handy when you are sitting or driving as the unit is longer than wide. Tight integration of the e-mail, phone and message capabilities. As an example an e-mail containing a hyperlink to a web site can be easily reached by rolling the thumbwheel switch to the portion of the mail containing the link and depressing the thumbwheel switch allowing one to launch the webviewer. Additionally, e-mail addresses in an e-mail can be easily captured for the address book in a similar fashion. Included SW seemed to plug and play out of the box better than most hardware and SW, albeit one must ignore the message that the SW has not been certified to work with WinXP. (I didn't get the same message when I removed the original SW 3.7 and reloaded SW 3.7 service pack 2) Included SW does not allow the viewing of e-mail attachments (Powerpoint, Excel, Word or PDF) if the Blackberry Enterpriser Server is not used. I understand 3rd party developers have developed SW to address this shortcoming. I used the Outlook out of office assistant/wizard to autoforward all e-mail to my Blackberry web client e-mail while on the road. Perhaps more clever rules could be made to place such e-mail in a separate folder as synchronization is not possible unless your firm adopts use of a Blackberry Enterprise Server. Besides the clever rolling thumbwheel and triggering selections by depressing the thumbwheel, there are numerous shortcuts available with a keystroke or two allowing you to jump to composing a message or to glance at a months view from the Calendar The top of the unit appears to have a IR port, but there is no mention of Infra red functionality (perhaps a future improvement?) The productivity benefits clearly outweigh the cost of the Blackberry 7280, but unless you actually use one it will be an uphill fight to convince fiscally conservative companies who will view such a device from a PDA perspective. PS) Perhaps a Jave2ME developer could generate an applet which would have a nice GUI allowing trip report expenses to be inserted into an Excel spreadsheet and then attaching the expense report to a wirelessly sent e-mail ;-)
Rating:
Summary: Good but..
Review: The 7280 WorldBand Blackberry Phone is a great phone if you need access to instant e-mail, something it does the best. The weight is just right and the operation reasonably easy.
On the con side, the screen gets dirty very easily and probably a form of glass would not be a bad idea in the next version. This screen is hard to clean.
Further the menu should be a lot more intuitive than the present version. You have to press buttons a lot to get things done.
If using it mainly as a phone, save your money and go buy a great phone only- since this is not a great phone. It is bulky to talk on, hard t0 dial simple numbers and does not have the goodies such as single touch dial or voice dial that is common on good phone devices.
However, if data is important to you, this unit will never leave your side.
The screen may be glorious compared to previous models but it is dull color - just do not expect a laptop quality screen.
Finally, I hope the price for this gizmo drops. It costs as much as a good surround sound system....you judge if it is worth it.
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