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The BlackBerry 8700c is the first smartphone I can wholeheartedly recommend. Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices are being fully considered when I make this statement. It is hard to express my satisfaction given the amount of time I’ve waited and researched, going all the way back to the Kyocera 6035 in 2000. The potential of the integrated PDA and cellphone has always made sense to me, but the reality has never matched my expectations - until I have this beautiful BlackBerry 8700c smartphone.

BlackBerry 8700c Features:

• Bright, high-res screen provides large viewable workspace and includes intelligent light sensing technology to automatically optimize screen lighting levels for ideal indoor and outdoor viewing.
• Lightweight handheld with a full QWERTY keyboard
• Access up to 10 supported business and/or personal email accounts
• Integrated attachment viewing for popular file formats
• Bluetooth hands-free headset and car kit support
• Unit Weight: 4.9 oz.
• Size (in inches): 2.9 x 4.4 x 0.94

I want to impart to readers of this review that this smartphone is the one you have been looking for, whether you are a current BlackBerry user or not. My last phone was the previous BlackBerry version, the 7100, however I have tested a wide range of smartphones over the past 6 years. In my review of the 7100, I told everyone that we were probably a year or so away from a five-star smartphone. That was a year ago. Modesty is not my strong suit.

This is the first smartphone I can wholeheartedly recommend. Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices are being fully considered when I make this statement. It is hard to express my satisfaction given the amount of time I’ve waited and researched, going all the way back to the Kyocera 6035 in 2000. The potential of the integrated PDA and cellphone has always made sense to me, but the reality has never matched my expectations - until I have BlackBerry 8700c! 

The BlackBerry 8700c meets and even exceeds my expectations as a true, integrated smartphone. The intuitiveness of the BlackBerry operating system remains excellent, but the phone itself is finally worthy. The volume is loud enough, the signal is strong enough, the unit is light enough, the battery life is long enough, and the integration is nearly perfect. This device is lightweight, intuitive, and reliable.

What most business and power users need is to eliminate having to carry a PDA separate from the phone, and to be able to process our emails. We want to look up a contact and call them. We want to receive our email, then either email or call the sender back without having a complex set of menus to navigate. We want to set reminders and consult our calendars. We want to manage our to-do list. We want to do all this reliably and quickly. For those of you who want a smartphone but think that the answer is a handheld computer running Windows Mobile, my comment to you would be that Windows Mobile smartphones are built to do too many things. This attempt to turn them into spreadsheet editors, cameras, MP3 players, laptop modems, etceteras, causes needless complexity, slows down the machine, and causes frequent freezing and crashing issues. These units are always larger and heavier than I find comfortable to hold, and usually require a stylus to input information. Some, like the one my friend just got six months ago, the top of the line at Cingular, has a pull-out keyboard. We played with his smartphone for hours. He showed off all the great functions, including the ability to use WiFi, the size of his color screen, etceteras. But he is a computer consultant. He tweaks it constantly. I walked away thinking that no one needs that many functions on their phone; that’s what a laptop is for. The sound quality when I talk to him is poor. His new BlueTooth headset sounds like crap, and he still cannot get the phone to do some of the things the manual says it can do. The battery life is weak, and he drops calls constantly.

Palm devices were great, back when they invented the PDA category. I bought my first Palm in 1996 and loved the simplicity and power packed into such a small device. However, I have since tested many Palm-based smartphones, from the old Kyoceras, through the Samsungs, all the way to the latest Treos, and they have all fallen far short of my expectations. They have never been fully integrated. In other words, you always have to operate either in phone mode or in PDA mode, and there are differences in how the menus function depending on which mode you are in. Sometimes the screen is a touchscreen, sometimes not. You can’t make the phone carrier’s network time, which is always accurate, become the phone’s system time, you must reset that manually. The touchscreen must be calibrated regularly, or it may get so out of sync that you cannot sync it without a hard reset. The stylus is a pain to use on a phone, yet some functions on a Palm-based smartphone cannot be accessed without removing and using the stylus. They are subject to lockups, followed by soft resets, and occasionally by hard resets, with great frequency. Email does not get pushed to these devices, you must manually go check your email to see if you have any. In Outlook, if you have multiple categories for a contact, only the first one imports to the Palm. In Palm, you cannot have a work and home address for the same contact, you must create a second contact if you happen to need both their addresses. You are limited to only thirty categories. If you try to add another in Outlook, it just overwrites one of the other categories the next time you sync. Palm OS simply hasn’t evolved enough to handle the needs of a modern smartphone user, nor have developers found a way to make the integration seamless enough.

I have a friend who just got the new Nokia 9300. This is the one that flips open sideways, with a full keyboard underneath and a big sideways screen. Nokia uses the Symbian OS. He and I demoed it for quite a while. He was trying to show me how easy it was to add my new email address to his database and send me an email. After ten minutes of trying, he gave up and went to the user manual. I pulled out my BlackBerry 8700, updated his email address in my address book, and sent him an email, all within about 30 seconds. I rested my case. Symbian is a loser; the sooner Nokia realizes this the sooner they can start making smartphones that work and stop losing market share.

The BlackBerry OS integrated smartphone is the best balance between usefulness, intuitiveness, and integration. In terms of integration, it is seamless and has been for some time now. The menus are intuitive. Whenever you depress the click wheel, only those menu items which apply to the screen you are on appear. For example, if you are reading an email and you click there, if the person who sent you the email is in your contacts database, you will see an option to call or text message this person, in addition to responding via email. If there is a phone number in the email, you can select that phone number and dial it instantly. If you are looking at the phone screen, a click wheel depression will offer to let you dial from the address book. When looking for a contact, you simply begin typing the first or last name of the contact, or the company name that contact works for, and the list of choices is pared down until you see your contact from among the remaining choices. When you click the wheel on that contact, the menu will show all phone numbers you have for that contact. In other words, if you don’t have a cell number for that contact, the choice of calling their cell number is not on the menu.

The screen is the best ever for a BlackBerry, and it rivals any other smartphone I have seen. I love how everyone harps on the size of the BlackBerries. The fact is that you can’t have a large screen and a keyboard on a phone the size of a matchbook. The size of the unit is about as compact as could possibly be expected for what it does.

The new processor is extremely fast. I manage over 5,000 contacts in the company database with ease on this new processor. The older BlackBerries had significant delays searching for contacts, as did all the other devices I have tested, so this is a huge improvement. Syncing to my Outlook database is much faster too. My sync operation went from approximately 5 minutes down to less than a minute when I upgraded to the BlackBerry 8700c.

The BlackBerry 8700c is much easier to hold and use as a phone than the original BlackBerry. There is no possibility of accidentally hanging up on your call because the side-mounted escape key does not perform that function anymore. This was one of my most severe criticisms of older BlackBerries. Now you have a real dial and hang-up key. Much better. Also the earpiece is natural and the sound is much clearer. Older units were almost impossible to keep centered on your ear and the sound volume rarely was high enough. The sound is also much clearer than the 7100 I owned prior to this, as is the signal strength. I put the two units side by side in an area of low signal strength, and the 7100 had only one bar and difficulty making calls, while the 8700 had nearly full strength and no issues making calls from the same spot.

Cons:

The Bluetooth functionality is still nearly zero. I can’t tell you how annoying that is. I keep hearing that they are planning on un-crippling it soon but for now the only thing you can use with it is a wireless headset. The history of this is that so many BlackBerries are used by the government, and security was the primary goal. However I fail to see why the consumer edition cannot offer that functionality. I can use my BlueTooth headset, that’s great, but a BlueTooth sync to my laptop would really make my day.

As I’ve mentioned in previous BlackBerry reviews there are some other things you should know if this will be your first foray into the BlackBerry world. This applies to all BlackBerries not availing themselves of the expensive but excellent BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) software solution: there is no “wireless sync” of your email, even though the option appears on your phone. I cannot understand why they don’t grey out the option so that users can avoid spending their precious time trying to chase this handy but unavailable feature. With BES, however, your corporate Exchange Server will be continuously and wirelessly synced with your Outlook. This is the ultimate solution.

Failing BES, which ordinary users without a corporate server will never have, (plus it costs $2500, making it hard for small businesses to afford either - are you listening, RIM?) you can choose to use the Web Server or the Desktop Redirector. I recommend highly that you stick with the Web Server. The Redirector forces you to keep your desktop computer on all the time, and it is annoying even when it is working properly. Web Server is the way to go here.

With the Web Server, your emails come to you realtime, automatically. It’s great, and is the key attraction to BlackBerry in the first place. As to the functionality of composing emails, I can only say that the full QWERTY keyboard is superior to the predictive text concept of the 7100. Generally the predictive text works OK, but it is tedious to spell proper names, technical words, etceteras, and there are several very common three and four letter words that it always seemed to guess the opposite of what I wanted, like “see” and “are”. You need a little more patience. I definitely recommend the full QWERTY keyboard, regardless of which smartphone you prefer. Anyone who claims that Palm’s Graffiti solution can compare to the speed and ease of a keyboard hasn’t used both or cannot type.

I found the sync between Outlook and the 8700 to be flawless. MUCH BETTER than Palm OS, and as a longtime Palm user I know what I’m talking about. You can even sync it to multiple address databases (I sync to my personal addresses and my corporate addresses simultaneously) and it does fine with over 5,000 addresses in memory. It has NEVER locked up on me or performed even a soft reboot.

Web surfing on Cingular’s EDGE network is MUCH faster than on the older GPRS network. The 8700 takes full advantage of that. It’s the first smartphone I can actually use for web surfing without getting impatient. You would still much rather be at your desktop for web surfing, but in a pinch, you can look up stock prices, check the weather, find a restaurant, etceteras, without having to wait too long between screens. I would say that the 8700 refreshes a web page in about 25% of the time needed for its older models.

There are a bunch of ringtones, which I could care less about, but they are polyphonic and very clear. The speakerphone actually works well. The holster on the 8700 is excellent and a huge upgrade versus the soft case of the 7100 and even better than the original BlackBerries. Very useful and well made. I have not seen a better one on any phone, period.

In conclusion, the BlackBerry 8700c phone is powerful and completely designed for business purpose and business people oriented. I love this phone. It’s the best available, and I say that confidently. I fault the device only for not offering full BlueTooth capability, but I guess perfection might be an unrealistic expectation.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Cell Phone Provider, Smartphone & PDA Phone Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.