Product Reviews

It's no longer enough to have email at work and home; people want it everywhere. RIM's BlackBerry 7230 met this need perfectly, thanks to its QWERTY keyboard and the push email system that delivered messages straight to your device without the need to dial up your ISP.

But it looked more like a pager than a phone, and many people felt rather foolish holding the 7230 up to their ear to make a call. So RIM has created a phone that can also email. There are some inevitable sacrifices: it's still wider than a normal phone due to the space required for its hi-res screen and extra keys, while the keyboard itself is no longer QWERTY.

Fortunately, this doesn't mean you have to use mobile-phone word prediction when typing a message. There are 20 keys on the BlackBerry as opposed to the normal 12 of a mobile phone, which means that each key represents a maximum of two letters. RIM's word-prediction software works well too. We found we could trust it to complete words accurately, rather than checking what it's doing after two characters. As it learns your vocabulary, it gets more

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accurate.

However, after two weeks of using the RIM we were still missing that QWERTY keyboard and it was taking some time to compose emails. Still, no doubt you'll be flying along after a few months, and it's a superb way to keep track of email as you can synchronise with up to 10 internet-based accounts, and it supports POP3, IMAP, MSN and Hotmail.

It's not such a great choice for internet browsing, though. Despite the GPRS connection, the wait for pages to load can be agonising, and in the end we abandoned the web, opting instead to use WAP for news, sport and the like.

The 7100v is also a PDA, with the ability to synchronise your contacts, calendar and tasks with your desktop PC. It uses Intellisync software (as do Palm devices) and works well. For example, all relevant contact information is copied across, and multi-day appointments are converted as such.

Battery life, as with almost all smartphones, is nothing special. Its bright, backlit screen takes its toll and the battery is of the normal, small mobile phone variety. RIM estimates eight days' standby and four hours' talk time; we found we were lucky to get three days of normal usage between charges. Fortunately, it recharges over a USB connection and there's a neat travel charger in the box too.

The 7100v has its problems, but don't let these put you off. It's a superior phone to the 7230, with good sound quality, an impressive speakerphone and support for quad-band GSM. And having your emails delivered wherever you are is a fantastic plus. Just note that add-on software such as Smartner Duality can push emails direct to the Sony Ericsson P900 and O2 XDA smartphones.