BlackBerry 7290 user reviews (T-Mobile)

4.5 stars

"This is a keeper!!!!" on October 25, 2005 by El Android

Pros: Push Email, great internet browser, excellent organizer/address book, bright as heck, compact, very customizable

Cons: Weakened signal strength, no speakerphone, not very good at organizing emails, no expanded memory slot

Summary: I've had this unit for one month and I'm ready to review it. Keep in mind my old phone was the Blackberry 7230 so I will be making comparisons throughout. This unit is incredible, I'm an email/internet junkie so this was custom made for me. Setting up the emails was a breeze, the phone is great, it's small and compact. The keypad is nice, easy to type...awkward at first but after a few dozen emails you will get the hang of it. Great choice of ringers, i'm not into those melody ringers and this comes with only 4 of those, the other 20some are nice ringers, although they could be louder. Even at the loudest settings some ringers are inaudible, but most are. And the vibrate is pretty good. Now to the good points I listed: The Push emails, it works like a charm, I have 2 Gmail accounts, 2 Yahoos and 2 Comcast accounts and they all work perfectly. I don's use the corporate account feature so I cannot speak of that. The internet browser is excellent, every option you would find in a "real" browser is available and 95% of the webpages I looked up come up great, the other 5% cannot be accessed due to security reasons, not sure what that means. Or some pages will not load because they are huge in content. The organizer and address book are sweet, too many options available, which is not a bad thing at all. Compared to the 7230, this thing is so bright! It has 2 levels of brightness, dim and bright. I use the dim setting because even that is brighter that the 7230. This also comes with backgrounds/wallpapers to put on your main screen, you can even save an image from any website and use it as a wallpaper. Now the bad: The 7290 is 2mm thicker and 1mm wider than the 7230. I held them side by side and you can tell the difference, and it's also a little heavier...minimal. Next I thought there would be some kind of option like in Outlook where you could create folders to put your emails into, there isn't. You can save them and they go to a 'Saved Folder', that was kinda dissapointing. Which brings me to the next con, you only have 15-17mb of space so you have to delete lots of e-mails you don't need. A SD card slot would have been great. And now the biggest con in this phone, the signal strength, it's weaked more than any other T-Mobile phone I've owned. This is a GSM/GPRS phone, the GPRS (Global Packet Radio Signal) takes up some of the signal that the GSM sends. In a nutshell your GSM phone signal is now shared by the GPRS signal therefore weakening the overall signal strength. The GPRS is what makes the browser, chat and Push email work so you're kinda screwed. I'm lucky that I live and work near towers, but if your signal is spotty where you live, it will get spottier with this phone. Like I said, for me this is not a problem. Overall I would never go back to a regular cel, Blackberries are the best units out there for what they do. Hope this helped.