I had the chance to play around with a BlackBerry 8800 for a few hours over the weekend and here is a brief summary of my initial thoughts:

The BlackBerry 8800 for the corporate business user is not a bad upgrade if you are coming from a device older than the BlackBerry 8700 and are already a Cingular subscriber. Outside of the BlackBerry Media Player and GPS, the 8800 doesn’t do much more than the 8700, however, has that sleek design to it that QWERTY BlackBerrys have been lacking until now.


If I would have been buying the BlackBerry 8800 purely for it’s GPS capabilities, I would probably return it and wait until the next version comes out where RIM has all the bugs worked out. It is slow compared to on-board navigation in my SUV and really slow compared to a handheld satellite GPS unit that a buddy of mine has. Actually trying to get BlackBerry Maps installed on the 8800 was a nightmare. Fortunately BlackBerry Forums Moderator, Stinsonddog, came up with a walk through to install the pre BlackBerry 8800 version of BBMaps on an 8800. I would have never figured it out on my own.

I am not impressed with the BlackBerry 8800 at all from a consumers standpoint. It looks cute, however, lack of Wi-Fi and a digital camera along with the archaic implementation of the Media Player really just miss the mark for me. There are other smartphone devices, i.e., the Q, the BlackJack, the Dash, etc. that for the same money or less, have lots more bells and whistles and seem to be better phones.

BlackBerry 8800