The 8800 is a near lookalike to its older sibling, the BlackBerry Pearl. It sports the same dark navy blue with chrome highlights, and the same white directional controller, but swaps the Pearl's 20-key predictive input system for a full 35-key QWERTY layout.
After the successful launch of the Pearl, the first consumer friendly from RIM, the company is back with another BlackBerry device for the business class. And we are glad to say that RIM has learned some valuable lessons from the delightfully vibrant Pearl. The RIM BlackBerry 8800 is a gorgeous device compared to its predecessors, primarily the 8700 series. In fact, we may even go as far as to say that the RIM BlackBerry 8800 may be sexier than Palm’s Treo, Motorola’s Q and Samsung’s BlackJack smartphones.
The BlackBerry 8800 looks like a larger version of the BlackBerry Pearl, which is not a bad thing. Besides the obvious trackball, it also comes with chrome bumbers and the same general shape as the Pearl, only wider, as opposed to the more stout-looking BlackBerry 8700 series. We like the trackball very much, we think it’s a great improvement over the old clickwheel, and was much less taxing on our thumbs. The keyboard took some getting used to. The letters are contiguous, rather than individually placed, as on previous BlackBerry devices. Each key has its own slope, which made typing a little nerve-wracking at first, but after a few long e-mails, we found our fingers had no trouble finding the keys without keeping our eyes on them.
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.
Boasting a sleek and sexy design, the RIM BlackBerry 8800 offers integrated GPS, push-to-talk capabilities, and multimedia features. The quadband smart phone also has Bluetooth, push e-mail, a full QWERTY keyboard, and long talk-time battery life.
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