Blackberry 8800 Mini-Review

Having been a long time fan of the Blackberry 8700c from Cingular I found myself being drawn to the latest edition to the Blackberry lineup, the 8800. Several of the new features such expandable memory and the GPS navigation seemed to make a very strong case for the cost of getting an upgrade. So I took the plunge and picked one up at the local Cingular store and after one month of using this new Blackberry I have quite an interesting review for everyone. If you are interested in making the upgrade from the 8700 to the 8800 then you won’t want to miss this review!

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First off let me get one thing out of the way right now, this Blackberry was not the upgrade I was expecting. Although the Blackberry 8800 provides a solid Blackberry user experience it unfortunately suffers from several flaws which prevent me from being 100% satisfied with it. As a long-time user of the 8700c I had already built up an expectation of how this new device should function which may influenced my perceptions on the new 8800. To be clear, overall the 8800 is a fantastic smart-phone, having all the typical features one would expect and with the new ability to upgrade the internal storage this Blackberry is a great choice. Where it falls down is in the area of performance, where my Blackberry 8700 seemed snappy and fast, the 8800 seems to feel laggy and in some rare cases even pausing in the middle of a task for several seconds. In my opinion this is unacceptable in a modern smart-phone. There should be no lag in switching between applications and one should never be left waiting while the device catches up.

From an ergonomic point of view the 8800 is definitely a step down. Where the 8700 was a no-brainer as far as menu navigation and general usability were concerned the 8800 makes for a very difficult switch. I found the lack of a side scroll wheel to be very annoying, being forced to use the trackball located at the center of the device instead. I found this arrangement to be significantly less easy to use and had me constantly trying to compensate by using two hands to do simple tasks vs. using only one (using my thumb on the scroll wheel) with the 8700. In addition to the problems with the trackball I also found the keyboard to be slightly harder to manipulate than the 8700. These two issues aside, the look and overall quality of the 8800 are much improved from the previous generations.

Performance aside, the Blackberry 8800 does have some very compelling features. The GPS system was one such feature that I gladly made use of as soon as my 8800 was charged up and ready to go. So how does the GPS perform? Well, like the performance of the device itself, rather slowly. The built in software (Telenav) for GPS (which costs a monthly fee of $9 extra) has a nasty habit of taking a significant amount of time to get a fix before letting you even make use of the navigation features. I was very disappointed in the software’s inability to quickly get up and running. Having to wait up to 5 minutes just for the phone to get a GPS fix really limited the usefulness of the software for quick navigation tasks such as finding a local gas station or fast food restaurant. Bottom line with the GPS is that it’s really just a neato gee-wizz gadget that most can do without, saving themselves the nine bucks in the process.

Ok, so the GPS is not so good but how does the phone rate with other applications. Here the news gets better, much better. I found the newer version of the Blackberry software to be much more feature-complete and overall more useful. Several new applications such as Blackberry messenger and the new video playback application all performed well and provided a solid, useful addition to the already popular Blackberry application suite. One improvement I really enjoyed was the ability to associate SIM contacts with incoming calls, something my 8700 could never do. Along with the default applications I was able to download Google Talk and an RSS reader called Newsclip, both of which performed flawlessly and made a great free download from RIM’s web site.

As for call clarity and the overall quality of the phone features of the 8800 I have only good things to say. In my judgement the call quality was somewhat improved from my 8700 which was quite good in most situations. I had several calls with the 8800 where I had only minimal signal and I was able to easily understand the person at the other end. So far I have not had any dropped calls but in my experience this problem is more network related vs. being the fault of the phone itself. Bluetooth support was solid, syncing up with my Plantronics Bluetooth headset on the first try. I also had the opportunity to try to this phone (and my 8700) with the BMW 335i with spectacular results! With both the in-car speakerphone and the Bluetooth headset calls were clear and range was never an issue.

One really good feature that sets the 8800 apart from the previous Blackberry models is the vastly upgraded battery life. I never had any complaints with the battery life on my 8700 but with the 8800 having almost double the actual talk time and standby times I won’t be complaining anytime soon. Even running the GPS and using the Bluetooth headset all day I still had plenty of battery life left (more than half!).

The bottom line on the Blackberry 8800 for those looking to upgrade from the Pearl or the 8700 is to wait for the 8300 which aims to offer similar functionality in a slightly small package and including the camera phone (for those who like that sort of thing). For those looking to move to the Blackberry for the first time, the 8800 offers a great package at a decent price (with a contract) but you may want to shop other Blackberry models before you decide the 8800 is for you.

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