BlackBerry 8800 review

Bonnie Cha CNET

Published: 27 Feb 2007

RIM's BlackBerry Pearl, released in September, had a sleek new design and added multimedia capabilities, giving it appeal beyond the business community that is the BlackBerry platform's core market. Yet, there were segments of the market — power business users and SureType keyboard haters — who shunned the Pearl in favour of the full QWERTY keyboards on their traditional BlackBerrys. Not so anymore. Making its debut at the 3GSM World Congress, the BlackBerry 8800 brings the sexier look and versatility of the Pearl to a full QWERTY device. Not only do you get multimedia functionality and expandable memory, but the 8800 also offers integrated GPS navigation. Mobile professionals will be served well by this device. Of course, it's not perfect. We're disappointed by the lack of both 3G support and integrated Wi-Fi, and call quality wasn't as good as we had hoped. Also, the device is quite wide, making it somewhat awkward to hold as a phone. All that said, messaging is still king on this device, and it performs those duties well.

Design

Taking its style points from the BlackBerry Pearl, the BlackBerry 8800 is sleek and sexy with its smoothed edges and a deep midnight blue casing and chrome accents. At 66mm wide by 114mm deep by 14mm high and 134g, it's relatively tall and slim and thus, easier to slip into a pocket or purse. That said, the 8800 is pretty wide, so clutching it in your hand and holding it up to your ear is a bit awkward and cumbersome. To be fair, this is typical of the full QWERTY BlackBerrys as well as Pocket PC phones and Treos.

The BlackBerry 8800 features a beautiful 2.5-in. (diagonal), 16-bit display with a 320-by-240 resolution. Text and images are clear and vibrant, and the screen also features light-sensing technology that automatically adjusts the backlighting of the screen, as well as the keyboard and trackball, depending on whether you're indoors or outdoors. We found that this function works well, and we had no problems reading the display under harsh lighting. However, the screen, as well as the casing, tends to hold a lot of smudges and fingerprints.

Also, carried over from the Pearl to the BlackBerry 8800 is the trackball. It's great because you can scroll four ways and also select items by pressing down, but we wish it were larger and raised more above the phone's surface. Also, it's easy to get carried away with the rolling of the trackball and go right past your selection, although you can adjust the trackball's sensitivity under the Options, Screen/keyboard menu. For that reason, we missed the jog dial and Escape key that have been mainstays of previous BlackBerrys — but as with anything new, these changes just take some getting used to.

Surrounding the trackball are the Talk and End keys and the Menu and Escape buttons. Below that navigation array is the 35-button QWERTY keyboard. Although there isn't much space between the keys as with the the BlackBerry 8700g, the buttons are pretty large so you should be fine. Each key also has a raised ridge to make them more tactile, but even so, we found the lacquered finish made the buttons slippery. The number keys are highlighted in white, and there's also a shortcut on the keyboard to activate the speakerphone.

On the right spine, there are volume up and down keys, while on the left side, you will find a 2.5mm headset jack, a mini USB port and a convenience key. There is a microSD expansion slot behind the battery, but good luck getting to it since it took some superhuman strength to take off the battery cover. We hope RIM reconsiders the placement of the expansion slot on future devices. Finally, the power and mute buttons are on the top of the unit.

The BlackBerry 8800 comes with a travel charger, a USB cable, a wired headset, a belt holster, a CD-ROM with BlackBerry Desktop software, and reference material.

Features

The BlackBerry 8800 keeps a lot of the same features that made it such a staple among the business set, but it also adds some to make it more than a messaging device. We'll start with those highlights first. To start, the BlackBerry 8800 now has multimedia capabilities. More specifically, you can use the built-in media player to listen to music (MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, and MIDI formats) and watch video (MPEG4, WMV, and H.263 files). We should note that there's about 64MB of flash memory available, but we suggest using a microSD card to store such larger media files.

The music player is pretty basic. Aside from standard stop and play functions, you can create playlists as 'folders' and shuffle and repeat songs within a certain folder. It also displays some track information, such as title, artist and album art if available. External player controls would have been nice, rather than having to press the Menu key first and then choose to skip a track or go back to the previous song. There's also an option to set a song as your ringtone. You can continue to play music as you use the device's other programs, and if you happen to get an incoming call, the BlackBerry 8800 will pause the music and pick up where you left off after you hang up.

For videos, the player has play and stop buttons, and you can fast-forward and rewind clips by clicking the trackball and scrolling right or left. There's still no full-screen mode, but since player controls only take up minimal space of the bottom of the 8800's spacious display, we're less forgiving of this fact than we were with the Pearl.

In addition to moving pictures, the BlackBerry 8800 has an image viewer that lets you peruse your favourite photos. However, there's no camera on the 8800, so you'll have to get your images onto your device another way — whether it's via USB, multimedia message, and so on. At the moment, RIM has no plans to offer a camera-equipped version of the 8800, in an attempt to appease customers who don't want or can't have camera phones. We certainly appreciate this precaution and understand it's a growing trend among businesses (for security reasons), but we'd still have liked the option of a model with a camera.

Road warriors will certainly appreciate the integrated GPS feature. There aren't many smartphones out there with this feature, so the BlackBerry 8800 certainly holds the advantage there. There's no need for a Bluetooth GPS receiver or the hassle of an extra gadget. All you need is the help of a location-based service, and you can get colour maps and text- and voice-guided driving directions right on the BlackBerry 8800, as well as points of interest and other navigation tools.

The RIM BlackBerry 8800 offers a speakerphone, voice-activated dialing, smart dialing, conference calling, speed dial and quad-band GSM connectivity. The phone book is only limited by the available memory (theSIM card holds an additional 250 contacts) with room in each entry eight phone numbers, email addresses, work and home address, job title and more. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo to a contact as well a group category, business or personal.

Wireless options are pretty much limited to Bluetooth 2.0, which you can use for headsets or hands-free kits. There is no A2DP support for Bluetooth stereo headphones, but the 8800 can be used as a wireless modem for your notebook. Although RIM has hinted at adding Wi-Fi to future devices, it doesn't start with the BlackBerry 8800. Even more bad news, the device doesn't support 3G networks, so you'll have to settle for GPRS speeds (or EDGE, if supported) when surfing the internet. While we're on the subject, the BlackBerry's browser supports full HTML Web browsing.

Of course, we can't forget what makes BlackBerrys famous in the first place: email. The BlackBerry 8800 offers the famed push technology and can sync with your company's BlackBerry Enterprise server with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino or Novell GroupWise to deliver corporate email in real time. All in all, the device can support up to 10 accounts, including POP3 or IMAP4 email accounts, and there is an email wizard on the device to guide you through the setup process. An attachment viewer is also onboard to open popular file formats, such as those from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel WordPerfect, as well as PDFs, JPEGs, GIFs and more. Other messaging options include text, multimedia and instant messaging, although the IMs are once again limited to the proprietary BlackBerry Messenger client.

Finally, the BlackBerry 8800 includes a number of PIM tools for the business users, including a calendar, a tasks list, a memo pad, an alarm and a calculator.

Performance

ZDNet sister site CNET.com tested the quad-band BlackBerry 8800 world phone in San Francisco using the Cingular Wireless service, and call quality was decent. Voices sounded a bit muffled on our end, and our friends reported the same results. It's nothing that prevented us from carrying on a conversation, but things certainly could have been better. Surprisingly, sound quality greatly improved when we activated the speakerphone. Everything was clear, and volume was more than adequate. We also had no problem pairing the 8800 with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset.

As far as the GPS functionality, the 8800 was adequate, and we were certainly impressed by the strength of the GPS receiver. From a cold start, it took the unit about two minutes to lock onto a satellite fix and held steady as we drove around the city. It accurately tracked our location on a free drive. On a planned trip, TeleNav (a location-based service provided through Cingular) delivered accurate but sometimes convoluted driving directions. On a couple of occasions, we knew there was a more direct route than the one presented to us. Still, for a mobile professional heading to a client meeting in a new place, this could be a huge timesaver.

Music playback sounded OK through the phone's speakers, although there was tinny tone to some songs. Video performance was quite good with clear image quality, although there was some pixellation during action sequences (as to be expected). The BlackBerry 8800 did falter a bit in the arena of Web browsing. After spending time with a number of 3G-enabled smartphones, the EDGE speeds of the BlackBerry 8800 seemed pokey, and we began to lose patience waiting for pages to load.

Overall, the BlackBerry 8800 delivered responsive and solid performance. The BlackBerry 8800's battery is rated for 5 hours of talk time and up to 22 days of standby time. In our tests, we were able to get 7.5 hours of talk time on a single charge.

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