I recently decided to purchase a BlackBerry 8700c from Cingular and felt it was time to give it a bit of a review. So far I’m over-all pleased with the device. Alex King recently bought one as well, it might be helpful to read his thoughts in addition to these if you’re considering purchasing one.

If someone asked me whether or not I thought they should purchase the device, I would most likely respond that it’s a great device, but there is no single perfect device for all users. As with any of these types of things, it would be good to go to a store and get your hands on one so that you can decide for yourself whether it is right for you or not. Be sure to ask plenty of questions and get the answers to them. It’s not a cheap purchase and you’re going to be bummed if you spend this much money and it doesn’t meet your needs.

Here are some quick lists of what I like and what I don’t:

What I like:
• Thumb Wheel: Man I didn’t think I’d really like the whole thumb wheel thing because I’d heard some people complain about it from time to time, but if you ask me, it’s what makes the device almost. From almost anywhere in the UI you can click the thumb wheel to either execute an operation (i.e. opening an application) or use it to bring up a menu and select your option
• Escape Key: This is kind of hand in hand with the thumb wheel. It’s placement by the thumb wheel lends itself to one handed operation quite nicely.
• Internet Connection Speed: It operates on Cingular’s GSM network for high-speed data transfer. Because of this the pages load fairly quickly. It’s no broadband connection, but I’d say it could be compared to most handheld devices connected to a wifi connection.
• UI: I’m using the default cingular skin on mine (with some icons moved around and hidden) and find it fairly easy to navigate. The location of items is fairly intuitive and after the first few hours with the device I don’t really have to search around for anything any longer. I like the arrangement of things as well, such as being able to see my SMS text messages, emails, open GTalk conversations, etc in the messages section
• GTalk: They did a pretty slick job with this. I installed it and was up and running in no time. It feels much like the desktop application in that you can see your buddies, their status and start conversations with them. You can see the conversation history and when the other user is typing. Conversations are even kept in the Messages section where your email shows up, etc (1 conversation = 1 entry in the list).
• “Holster Awareness”: I totally love that the device knows when it’s in the holster or not and the fact that you can set it to vibrate if it’s in the holster, or ring if it’s not. I can’t tell you how many times with my cell phone I would set it to vibrate then set it down when I got home on something like a pillow or a seat cushion and then missed calls because I couldn’t hear it going off.

What I don’t like:
• Multiple Email Account Handling: Cingular/BlackBerry will gather email from up to 10 email accounts for you and push it to your BlackBerry. This is alright, but as Alex King has found, it’s a pain if not impossible to set up multiple from addresses when you’re replying to or composing email addresses. I’ve tried BBReply, but it doesn’t work on the OS Version that is running on my BlackBerry. UPDATE: I’ve somewhat overcome this. Here’s a how-to for setting up BBReply on the 8700 that worked for me.
• Synchronization: Since I’m not using my BlackBerry with an Exchange server, my options to synchronize seem pretty limited. I don’t run Outlook locally or anything. I have been using the calendar on my BlackBerry, mainly out of convenience since it’s always with me, but there are definitely times where I’d prefer to set up events on my computer and just have it synch up. Supposedly Yahoo! and BlackBerry are getting together to offer tighter integration, once that happens I think this point will be mostly addressed.
• Bluetooth with a headset: I’m thinking this might be mostly newbie error, but for some reason if I am not on a phone call and I holster my blackberry, it disconnects from my headset after a short period of time. This is pretty annoying to be honest. But I can’t find any kind of a idle timer for the bluetooth connection or anything
• I find the speakerphone to only be “so-so.” If you and the person you are speaking to are in relatively quiet environments it can work nicely (I was even ok in my car with the music off). However there was once where the person I was speaking with had a lot of background noise and the BlackBerry wouldn’t turn on the mic when I spoke so they were having a lot of trouble hearing me (this seemed to be the case at least).

Here are a few quick tidbits that have helped me with the device:
• Pressing Alt-Esc works much like Alt-Tab on the PC and Mac. It’s nice for moving quickly between applications
• You can use the “CAP” key much as a shift key which will allow you to highlight text or multiple items in a list so that you can delete/copy/paste
• Alt-[Thumb Wheel Click] on the home screen will allow you to move icons around or hide/unhide icons