BlackBerry 8800

As with the Pearl, the 8800 also has options for changing the fonts and a font smoothing option that doesn’t really seem to make much of a difference. But you can choose a font and its size to suit your requirement. The rest of the functions are again identical to that of the Pearl’s. For example the Pearl (the trackball) can be used to select options and the menu button can be used to access the context sensitive sub menus to change details of the folder you’re navigating though. And of course the back / Escape key, but of course the application doesn’t shut down so you can simply go back to what you were doing later.

Email and Web
As with the BlackBerrys of the past the 8800 has maintained the BlackBerry standard with regards to emailing. As ever, it's easy to chat, send, receive, and forward emails. With the QWERTY keypad it is a little better, more traditional than its predecessor's SureType when it comes to sending mails. Viewing attachments as well was a cinch.

I did have a few connectivity issues while commuting to the suburbs, but not too much. Certain areas of the city do have range problems so that’s nothing to pull the chain on. What I would like to mention here is that the look of the web pages hasn’t really changed since the 8100 and that’s not a good thing. Just like the Pearl, they look rather dry and unattractive after they’ve been resized to fit the page. I'm obviously comparing this to the E61's splendid web browsing capabilities.

What I really liked was the Page Preview command in the menu that allows you to see the entire page in a small section on the right of the screen. All you'd need to do is scroll through to the section you need and the main screen automatically jumps to that point and by simply clicking the Pearl it opens right there.

The 8800 like the Pearl can also sync with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, exchanging email, calendar, tasks etc. For chatting, the device is ready with Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.