12 hours with the Verizon Blackberry 8830

Our current data enabled device pool consists of mainly Palm Treo’s. We have a couple 700p’s and a 650 here and there. The Treo’s are still very functional, and with Good[tm] software on them, Exchange sync and collaboration is still pretty good.

The problem with the Treo’s is well documented. Their bluetooth implementation is complete garbage. It also has some network/multitasking related issues. About half the time you’re trying to surf (if you can call it that), send an SMS, or compose an email and it will just freeze for 20 seconds or so.

This is really, really annoying.

The device itself is getting somewhat dated. It’s fat, and just generally not stylish these days. It is to me the stone axe of mobile handhelds. The phone (outside of it’s dicked up BT) is a decent phone, and Good[tm] makes it good. I have yet to find a keyboard that works as well as the Treo’s.

But it’s time to find something else, hopefully something better and this was the best Verizon had to offer.

(yeah the iPhone is cool and neeto, but I’ll beat on it at a later date, we’re stuck with Verizon and they don’t have the iPhone).

First, registering or activating this phone was the easy part usually is.

The next step involved getting the Blackberry Enterprise Express server up and running.

(Here’s the rub for all you Good[tm] people, good doesn’t do Blackberry anymore, so if you switch your Good[tm] investment is out the window. That can be pricey.

What a pain this installation was. It was very much like installing Goodlink, only worse. I have a buddy testing the same phone, he was able to install the software mostly w/o a hitch. His environment is a little different though.

Apparently you cannot have terminal services enabled on the same server as Blackberry Enterprise server. The installer didn’t like it, and things didn’t go well if you marched forward. Fair enough, 1 hour wasted.

I located another server to do the dirty work. Of course I didn’t have Outlook, nor the Exchange tools, so therefore no MAPI on the server. (My problem, not Blackberry’s) In case you need this, and don’t want to install everything MS does publish a stand-alone mapi components installer here.

Once that was complete the installation was pretty much by the book, although very time consuming.

After adding my device, authorizing it and syncing it up, life was good until I tried to send a message. This was an exercise in futility. The Blackberry installation tool kit, a collection of docs and how-to-install-for-dummies. Is pretty good. Good until you have an issue. Calling Blackberry is even less helpful. Google to the rescue? I Googled my but off and it became clear that this had to be a permissions issue in exchange. I checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and couldn’t find it. I stopped and started the information store, stop and started the BB Enterprise server, all to no avail.

Then some magic happened and it just started working.

So far in about 6 hours of playing with this phone, I think it’s growing on me. It’s taking a while to break from the years of Good[tm] habits I’m used too. There are things that still aren’t obvious, and a lot of things that are just plain horrible.

There are too many icons/applications for the functionality of this phone. All the preferences are spread all over the place, and there are only 3.2 million options. Options are good, but damn, there are a LOT of them.

I miss the Treo touch screen already, and the ball thingy on the 8830 is OK, but the 5-way navigator on the Treo is better.

Things like sorting messages or getting back to the top aren’t so obvious on this phone after you’ve scrolled that little ball for 10 minutes to get to emails from two days ago.

On a scale of 1-10, I find usability of this thing to be around a 5.5. Yeah, it’s OK, but it aint great. Blackberry has had good email devices and shitty phones. The phone part of this thing seems decent but I’m not sure the Blackberry software is all that user friendly, at least not what I would expect in the day and age of OS X, Vista, iPhones, and stuff like that.

We’ll see if I can grow to like it.