This Ordinary Life

My company, in line with most companies nowadays, dishes out Blackberries to all their employees. I must admit I do like the convenience of having my inbox in my pocket, but the frustrations of the 8700 and limitations the Blackberry email system as a whole often outweigh the benefits.

The 8700 is a chunky little unit with a reasonable colour screen. It is quite heavy so it can only really live in a jacket or trouser front pocket (I prefer my mobile inboxes slimmer so they can fit in a shirt pocket). Battery life is good with it lasting about 3-4 days on a single charge under regular use. It also functions as a phone, but this drastically reduces the battery life. There is no multimedia functionality.

The interface is where things start to fall down. Using a click wheel you navigate menus with a spin and click. There is a full QWERTY keyboard with other common symbols as secondary functions of the keys. The keys are just big enough for thumb typing, but it would be a pain for anyone with sausage fingers. Be careful when typing as you can easily end up in the phone interface or elsewhere, so this isn't for you if you type essays on the go. Not to mention it doesn't have predictive text or spell checking functionality.

Most frustrating is the limited built in memory (64MB) and lack of expansion slot, which becomes particularly painful if your Blackberry ever crashes. Mine did during a Date/Time update patch where a JVM 101 error occurred. Not sure what this error means, but to me it meant that I had to get a replacement Blackberry. The problem is that when you get a replacement and it is synced with the Blackberry Server for the first time, it only syncs mail from that point forward. I am told this is to preserve memory as the text of every emails is actually download to the unit's local memory. In my case, it meant that I could only access older emails from my desk. No very convenient when I was on the go and had clients asking me about emails from a month ago. I hope that the people at RIM were smart enough to address this issue in the more recent models such as the "Pearl" and 8800?

Despite thes shortcomings, there are a few of things that you can do to make the 8700 much more enjoyable. Plus you get the joy of circumventing your company's IT usage policy regarding instant messangers. Power to the people for beating the system.

First, download GTalk for the Blackberry. This can be download via the Blackberry Internet Browser on http://mobile.blackberry.com. My company bans all instant messengers, but for some reason GTalk on the Blackberry still functions. Messaging on the Blackberry is great and keeps you in touch with all your Google-enabled brethren.

Second, download GMaps for the Blackberry. This again can be accessed from the http://mobile.blackberry.com. Although a bit data heavy (not a problem if your company is paying), this puts the power of Google Maps in the palm of your hand. It has helped me find my way through London's back streets on a number of occasions.

There are several other downloads on the Blackberry mobile website like Texas Hold'em, guaranteeing your entertainment.

All in all, the Blackberry 8700 is a good basic little unit, but is under threat from the new Blackberry killers (I particularly like the Treo 650). If Blackberry's latest units aren't an improvement on the 8700, even RIM's software monopoly won't be enough to preserve market dominance.

And finally, I'd like to share a gripe from a friend who works at the French bank, BNP Paribas, whose gripe I am sure is shared by the masses. People use Blackberrys when they are out of the office and primarily in the evenings and weekends. Therefore, having a Helpdesk open weekdays between the hours of 9am and 5pm is about as smart as voting Nicolas Sarkozy as president...