An Update to 12 hours with…

Well, for now it’s over. I’ve used the Blackberry 8830 for a week and I just boxed it up to send back, though I have a few more days. Perhaps going back and using my Treo for a few days will help me really decide that it was better or not but so far:

Pros of this phone:

• Battery life is good.
• Bluetooth implementation is excellent unlike the Treo.
• BB Enterprise server is essentially the same as Good[tm] but has a ton more options.
• This phone has a LOT of options.
• Voice quality is good.
• It’s thinner.

Cons of this phone:

• The interface isn’t simplistic or even all that polished.
• That track ball thingy is weird. The Palm 5-way is optimized, as are Palm apps for what they do. This thing, not so much.
• This phone has a LOT of options and they are all over the friggin place.
  • Where certain options are doesn’t always make sense.
• This phone doesn’t ‘WOW’ me. In a lot of ways the PIM/PDA functions are just hard to use. That may be function of not having some of the 2.5 million options set up correctly but it’s not always intuitive.
  • For two days it’s had some sort of new message indicator that I can’t make go away.
    • It’s not an email
    • It’s not a voice mail
    • It’s not an SMS message
    • But it thinks there is a new message somewhere. Now on palmOS you’d tap this icon and it take you there. You can’t get to this icon and it isn’t a button.
• To move more than myself to this we abandon Good[tm] and have to buy BES server plus licenses.

All that being said, the goodness of the phone almost makes up for the pda shortcomings. If my Treo were lost or broken I could replace it with the Blackberry and be OK.

But I’m not looking for just ‘OK’

I’d like to get my hands on the Samsung i760 that’s rumored. Hell it was rumored in January but it doesn’t look like it will hit the streets for another month or two. I’m not a big Windows Mobile fan by a long shot but at least it wouldn’t cost me more since Exchange push is essentially free.

The current crop of phones is not good, not for Enterprise users. I think BB is resting on it’s laurels in some areas. Finally they have a decent phone, now they need to make major strides on the PDA portion.