RIM Blackberry 7280 (Cingular Wireless)

BlackBerry OS has long held a dominating presence in the business world, thanks to its ease of use and great email technology. Research in Motion designed BlackBerry to be an e-mail powerhouse, and this has helped secure its place in the smartphone arena.

The BlackBerry operating system does a better job managing your contacts than managing your calendar. The Address Book applet offers all the amenities you'd expect, plus contact grouping and unsurpassed integration with the phone and messaging applications. To send someone an e-mail, for instance, you simply highlight the person's name, press the click wheel, and then select "E-mail Joe Smith." There's no need to open the contact's record and navigate extra menus. RIM also supplies the obligatory memo pad and to-do list, along with an alarm clock, a calculator, a photo viewer, and a password manager--all functional but rudimentary applets.

Like a traditional PDA, a BlackBerry smartphone can synchronize with your PC, swapping data with Outlook or Lotus Notes; the bundled Intellisync utility makes this possible. Of course, the BlackBerry operating system also provides robust wireless synchronization, meaning new appointments, contacts, memos, and tasks can be "pushed" from your office to your handheld (and back again), just like e-mail. That gives BlackBerry mobile phones a fairly major advantage over PDAs that rely on more-traditional synchronization methods.

Read more in the Quick Guide to Handheld Operating systems

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