After much hemming and hawing and spitting and scratching, I broke down and bought the newest Blackberry telephone the 7100t from T-Mobile, which is part of the BlackBerry 7100 Series.
For over one year, I thought about purchasing the now famous Treo 600 and looked at all the Treo rumor sites for information about the upcoming Treo 650 that looks very sweet indeed. But I realized that I did not want to spent about $500.00 to continue on with the relatively crappy Sprint PCS network which offers both high cost plans and average customer service. And I didn’t want a telephone that can do everything except wash the dishes because I believe that PDAs are best kept on a tight leash lest they dominate the remaining brain space we all have outside of our cubicles.
The new Blackberry, at $199, is just right. It isn’t for the power-user, the ones who want to stay up all day and night glued to their handheld to see who emailed or imed every few minutes or moments. And the keyboard, which innovatively combines two letters on every key in the small QWERTY keyboard takes some getting used to. It’s easy to hit a wrong key on the thing but I do that anyway on my 18″ keyboard and the last thing I want to do is actually “type” on a phone.
With the brilliant advent of third-party Mac synchronization software for the BlackBerry (which took 14 months to produce, apparently without much thanks to Research in Motion, I can now see all my calendar events, contacts, to do lists, and emails on the same device. (No need for a phone, PDA, or a short-term human memory!) Email comes fast and furious thanks to RIM’s superb email handling service and the phone is small, the way phones should be.
Best yet, surfing on the Web on the device, while slow, is actually possible and the screen resolution combined with a usable scrollwheel on the side is very, well, handy.