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GCN Home > 11/21/05 issue

A freshly picked BlackBerry ripe for use

By John Breeden, GCN Staff

RIM’s latest handheld is an impressive answer to Palm’s Treo

Ask a government worker to describe his personal continuity-of-operations plan, and he might pull out his BlackBerry. The handheld devices have seemingly become standard issue in and around the halls of power. The various BlackBerry models offer basic e-mail access, a QWERTY keyboard, long battery life and scheduling software. But hold onto your hats, because the new BlackBerry 8700c blows the doors off every existing model the way a 2006 Corvette would race ahead of a Model T Ford.

Everything in the 8700c is either brand new or vastly improved. This is really the first BlackBerry model that can compete head to head with Palm OS devices such as the Treo 650 in nearly every respect. Before its formal launch this month, the GCN Lab was able to test one of the very first 8700c devices over a period of a couple of weeks.

Fast performance

The first thing you’ll notice about the 8700c, especially if you’ve used other BlackBerry devices, is its performance. Armed with an Intel PXA901 processor running at 312 MHz, all programs execute with lightning speed. The 64MB of flash memory and 16MB of SRAM don’t hurt either. And you can leave programs open: If you are working on your schedule, for example, and suddenly have to look at your e-mail, just switch back to the calendar later without any data loss. Keeping programs open doesn’t seem to slow down the device, at least not noticeably.

To really test the 8700c’s performance, we enhanced a photograph e-mailed to the inbox. We imagined the huge 2MB crowd shot was a crime scene and zoomed so far in on a suspicious person in the back of the photo that the person was little more than a two- or three-pixel blob. Then we selected the Enhance Photo option, and after several seconds we could see not only the person’s face but also the red bag he was carrying. This photo-enhancing software is standard with the 8700c and can also be used to read faxes and notes that come in as attachments.

More news on related topics: Mobile & Wireless, New Products / Technology



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