Well it came to pass. My trusty Palm 700p finally bit the dust. It would no longer charge any of the (3) batteries that I have, regardless of the charger.

I don’t know if this was a side effect of the recent Update that Verizon released, then pulled or not but within 2 weeks of applying said patch my phone was dying a horrible death.

It was time for a change anyway. I had recently demo’d the Blackberry 8830 World Edition from Verizon. I used it for approximately 3 weeks. It was nice, but not enough ‘nicer’ to make me dump the 700p.

I was really hoping to be able to hold out until Verizon could come up with a better all-around business oriented phone. Given their track record, that’s simply not going to happen in my lifetime. So after looking at the alternatives again, which included the new Moto-Q, I opted for the Blackberry again.

Pros:

• As a phone the 8830 is pretty good. Good speaker volume.
• It has working Bluetooth!
• Blackberry Enterprise Server is free for a single user. It’s as good as Goodlink on the back end, their support is outstanding.
  • After reneabling the BES server and trying to add my new phone I ran into some issues. I started with Verizon tech support who escalated to BB tech support. Within 10 minutes I was up and running. I can’t imagine that support from either Palm or Good. I’m still in shock over the fact that the Verizon data device guy that I spoke with was actually quite good.
• Messages: BB sticks all your messages, email, and SMS into one mail folder. I initially didn’t like this but it’s grown on me. You can tweak this too, but I kinda like it.
• Form factor, it’s much smaller (read thin) than the Palm. With the 700p to get more than a day of battery life I had to have the big elephant SEDIO battery, which added thickness and bulk to the 700p.
• Battery life, so far seems very reasonable. I will opt for a bigger battery as soon as one hits the market.
• Google Apps for this device just plain rocks.
• The built in browser is no worse than ‘Blazer for Palm’
• Opera Mini 4 beta is buggy but decent. Still kind of painful to browse with.

Cons:

• Ringer and Alert volume. The latest Verizon patch was supposed to help with this but it doesn’t. I can’t get this thing to ring loud enough for me. Judging by the speaker phone it clearly has the capability to have decent volume.
• Ring and Vibrate is hoaky. It vibrates, then rings, but it seems like the processes that handle doing both can’t do it together, at the same time. The vibrate is weak too. I’m going to miss calls with this thing.
• Keyboard, it doesn’t suck but takes some getting used too.
  • It needs a dedicated ‘.’ key.
• Too damn many options, buried all over the place. Poorly written options/preferences screen. It’s bare bones and works but it’s not pretty at all.

None of the Microsoft OS based phones are any good. They still blow chunks. They are slow and doggish. Even the new Moto Q is bad news. I supposed it’s fine for a lightweight user but if you live and die by your data enabled phone Windows Mobile still sucks.

So this is what I’m destined to use until iPhone 2.0 with Enterprise features is available (no imap to Exchange is not enterprise support), or something better comes along. Enterprise people need email push, calendar and contact synchronization, etc, etc.