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review: rim blackberry 7230

a few years ago i was in waterloo, ontario in a meeting with the blackberry product manager. one of the bonehead "salesguys" i was with piped in and said "you know, you really need to make your devices look cooler. the graphics look terrible compared to a palm or pocket pc, and you have to have color". i remember thinking " i'd trade it all as long as i can keep my week long battery life! email and battery life." today i hold in my hand the blackberry 7230, the first color model to appear in the US. the graphics do look cool, and well, so far the battery is holding up. let's face it, monochrome screens are a thing of the past. in a year owning a monochrome phone will be a bit like owning a black and white tv, especially in the PDA world.

the blackberry (aka the "crackberry") is perhaps the most addictive piece of gadgetry out there, to the extent that the CEO of RIM and his wife have to lock their devices in a safe over dinner so that they do not respond to incoming emails. for receiving and responding to emails on the go, there is no equal. i've been a "user" since the first iterations, and have owned the mobitex, ineternet, enterprise, GPRS, and even the AOL versions at one point or another in my career. i must admit lately i've been getting by with email retreived via GPRS on various smartphones, and have relished not being tied to this device, but with the release of the 7230, it was definitely time for a relapse.

the form factor of the 7230 is a little smaller on the length and width than previous generations, but a little thicker in the depth depth, probably to accomodate the on board phone. the custom roller-escape button combination is still there and rim has added a quick access phone button on the top. the phone is now tri-band 900/1800/1900 so you no longer have to leave your RIM at home when you go transcontinental (although with GPRS, you have to leave it at home if you go to rural america).

side by side:

thickness:

browsing to cnn:

rim doesn't claim to market the 7230 and its ilk as a replacement phone, but it's there if you need it - which is probably a good move given the device's profile. that said i think there will be times where this is the only device i carry, with my primary number forwarded to the rim. despite what i've seen in some other articles about the 7230, the rim phone does not require the use of an earbud, you can put the device right up to your cheek and use it like a phone, which doesn't look as awkward as one might think. one cool feature the phone has is "smart dialing" which gives you the ability to put extensions in your phone book, and insert necessary pauses. if this exists on other phones, i haven't seen it - but then again, i never read phone manuals. i expect them to just be naturally usable. c'mon, it's just a phone, right?

using the embedded browser/gateway combo provided by t-mobile, wap sites are fast and easy to read (they still put the same old t-zones wap stack on this device) and most HTML sites are transcoded in a way that makes them usable and readable, just by using the scroll wheel.

as far as mobile email, RIM has gotten rid of the "internet" and "enterprise" versions, bundling capabilities of both onto one device. you can setup up to 10 external email accounts to be polled and pushed onto the device every 15 minutes or forward your mail directly to the device. you get an email address for the device ( userid@tmo.blackberry.net ) but you can set the "From" address to anything you want using the blackberry.net website, so no one ever knows you are using your blackberry. i personally use procmail on unix to forward my mail to my RIM so i receive mail immediately, but your IT department may or maynot be willing to do this.

you can now view .doc, .ppt, .xls, and .pdf files out of the box, which in itself is a huge improvement over the older versions i owned. i was especially impressed by the PDF viewer, but disappointed there are no image viewers. after all, i have a color screen now! in general, GPRS mail delivery seems a lot faster than on previous versions (but then again, tmobile's GPRS just seems a lot faster in general lately).

Also included is a "BrickBreaker" game which is a breakout clone that shows off the color and works pretty well with the scroll bar.

the SMS version of aol instant messenger worked great on this device, and of course texting is extremely easy. unfortunately, there is no MMS client so the picture messages i get (i'm getting more and more these days) will just go into the bit bucket. please, someone write an MMS client for this device. pretty please.

the biggest problem for rim is still the lack of third party applications that will help them breakout of the corporate marketplace. even after making the device able to run J2ME apps, we have not seen the plethora of commercial apps that have sprung up for say, symbian devices (i'd say palm, but palm had a huge head start). it will be interesting to see what happens once palm and nokia integrate the blackberry email capability into their devices. if it works well enough, will anyone purchase one of these? i don't know how many time's i've heard "if only i could get blackberry email on my palm". i'm sure RIM is well aware of this, as they don't sell that many devices. it's probably the software that gets them the real margins. actually, i don't think palm has announced integrating the email capability, just the keyboard, but we'll see what they do.

i did receive a few java stack trace exceptions while using the browser (most of you call these bugs) but the device didn't crash and second tries usually got past these.

so if you are already a blackberry addict - i do recommend the 3230 as an upgrade, and if you ever wanted a blackberry, this is a good place to start. the color screen does make the device more enjoyable to use, believe it or not, although with the supplied apps, it practically won't make that much of a difference. battery life with color doesn't seem to be an issue, and it's even less of an issue since it now comes with a USB charger out of the box. if you are already travelling with a laptop, all you need to carry is one lightweight cable. of course, hopefully there will be a few trips where i can only carry this device, and leave my laptop at home.

if you occasionally need a phone, but rely heavily on your email and texting, this might be the best device for you.

cost
t-mobile us sells for $399 USD. unlimited email service is $39.99/month.