RIM BlackBerry 7100v

Everyone is desperate for their slice of the BlackBerry pie: the past two months have seen a flurry of announcements from Palm, Symbian and a plethora of phone manufacturers declaring their forthcoming support for BlackBerry technology. They all know email is fast becoming a standard feature of mobile devices.

Plenty of modern phones support email, of course, but what always made BlackBerry special was its push technology. With this, you don't need to dial up to collect your email: just sit back and wait for the messages to come to you. Wherever you are, if an urgent email comes through to any of your email addresses - and the 7100v supports up to ten - you can act on it instantly.

Trouble is, there are very few phones available to take advantage. There's the Nokia 6820, with its fold-out keyboard, but its operating system is looking dated, and you can buy third-party software such as Smartner Duality to push email to smartphones like the Sony Ericsson P900. Otherwise you're restricted to RIM's own devices, such as the BlackBerry 7230 - and to call this a phone is stretching the definition to its limit. Hold the calculator-like 7230 to your ear, and you'll get some very strange looks indeed. The 7100v, on the other hand, looks to the innocent eye exactly like a hi-tech phone.

We'd still hesitate to call it stylish. The plastic finish looks, well, plastic, and the 7100v has a squat, rectangular look despite RIM's best attempts to style the corners. It's quite portable though: it weighs just 120g and is slimmer than the majority of mobile phones. Admittedly, it's a little wider than your average Nokia, but in return, you get a bright 240 x 260 screen and a 20-key keyboard.

It's the keyboard that separates the 7100v from the competition, as it's the physical sign of RIM's latest innovation: SureType word recognition. Each key holds a maximum of two letters (as opposed to the three on a normal mobile phone), with the QWERTY layout stretched across the top three rows. You just spell out the word as you would when writing a predictive-text SMS, and the correct word should appear on the screen.

As with learning to type, it takes some time to master where each letter is, but we suspect that after a month or two of continuous use most people will be pretty fluent. Just beware that the fluency won't come instantly. Touch-typists will tell you they don't actually know where the letters are on the keyboard; their fingers just go there instinctively. With the 7100v, your brain will have to re-learn that process. And until it does, you'll be hunting and pecking, which makes writing long replies to emails a tedious process. RIM doesn't help things by not giving the apostrophe its own key - you must hit three keys at the very least to get this one, very frequently used character.

But don't get us wrong. SureType is ingenious, and worth persevering with as it holds advantages over its key rivals. There's no hinge to break, as there is with the Nokia 6820 and Sony Ericsson P900 - and indeed, with several other forthcoming phones that have BlackBerry built-in. The other obvious advantage is that the keys are larger than those of the Handspring Treo 600 (see Smartphone supplement, issue 113, p24).

Where the P900 and Treo strike back, however, is with their touchscreens. The only way to navigate the 7100v's graphical interface is via the jog dial that sits on the right side of the device. To an extent, this is fine; it doesn't take long to master scrolling to your chosen icon. You then just select it (by pressing down on the jog dial), which will launch the app.