BlackBerry 8800 (AT&T)

Pros: Great Screen, Voice Dialing, Push 2 Talk with Multimedia Capabilities

Cons: No 3g, moderate web browsing sometimes sluggish

Summary: This is my first Blackberry device and I am really impressed with the great features such as: Voice Dialing that when used with a Motorola Headset H550 or greater you can activate voice dialing through the headset by tapping the talk button instead of flipping through the menu on the phone manually, either way you still get excellent sound quality.

The menus are very intuitive and easy to navigate using the trackball which is an excellent design, being that I never owned a Blackberry prior to this one; I missed the track wheel that has made its mark among long-time Blackberry users.

The calling features are really great for the mobile professional or In Office, you can view your calls and go to history and see how long you talked, how many times you made a call or vice versa in addition, it will also show if the call went through or was aborted. While on a call you can fire off emails, sms, mms or pin messages to your customers on the fly within the call menu or call and send a fax and check your voice mail.

The scheduler is sort of plain compared to the palm but it is very good for keeping appointments with so many different notifier sounds and alarms. The Address Book allow you to set up groups such as I have being that I am in the Beauty Salon Business my groups consists of: Makeup – Skincare – Bath Body and Beauty Services so that when certain events come up I can mass email by groups making it a snap!

The push to talk feature if you like that is great also especially in certain industries where this feature would be useful, the noise reduction is also great while using the phone for voice conversation and push to talk.

I was formerly a Palm Treo 650 user, as with palm there are thousands of applications out there to enhance your device and Blackberry has some really useful software also, just waiting on DataViz to become available for Blackberries and then that would be all I need to carry my documents with me and have the viewing capability in addition, to document editing and it work seamlessly with Office 2007.

Multimedia is great! I can not believe the sound on this device it is loud. You can control the volume, but it is more than adequate for listening to music, viewing slideshows from the photos menu and viewing videos. Now there is no video recorder on the 8800 just for viewing only and your memory card will store all of your multimedia files so make sure to get a gig or more if you plan on loading up your phone.

I truly enjoy viewing mobile sized web pages and bookmarking the ones I will most likely visit often, the free games downloads and other great applications for your device on http://mobile.blackberry.com

When I saw this device, I thought it was drop dead gorgeous, even though it is a midnight blue instead of the black they advertise.

Bottom line this phone is great for the road warrior and for my salon biz and I would certainly recommend this device to all my friends and colleagues, you will be surprised at how the Blackberry 8800 will meet all of your expectations.