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The new BlackBerry 8700 from Research In Motion (RIM) is a refinement on past BlackBerry handhelds rather than a major breakthrough. The 8700 is nevertheless a worthy addition to the line-up, offering both speed and elegance for RIM’s primary target audience, the enterprise market.

The 8700 is a Bluetooth-enabled quad-band world phone that works on 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz GSM/GPRS and EDGE networks. It also includes all the usual BlackBerry e-mail and personal information management (PIM) functions.

Available in the U.S. from Cingular Wireless as the 8700c, it is priced at $300 (after a $50 rebate) with a new two-year contract. In Canada, Rogers Wireless offers the new BlackBerry as the 8700r for $600 CDN with no contract or $540 CDN with a two-year contract. The American and Canadian versions are identical except for cosmetics. We reviewed the 8700r on the Rogers network.

The BlackBerry Look
The 8700 looks more PDA than phone.

Unlike the recent 7100 line of BlackBerry smartphones that take a narrower more phone-like shape by replacing the Blackberry's traditional QWERTY keyboard with an extended number pad, the 8700 is square-ish like earlier BlackBerry handhelds, though a little thinner and sleeker than classic models at 4.3 x 2.7 x 0.8 inches (110 x 69.5 x 19.5 millimeters).

At 4.7 ounces (134 grams), the 8700 is also slightly lighter - by a few grams - than other BlackBerry handhelds too.

Screen
The display, a color LCD supporting over 65,000 colors, is a 320 x2 40 landscape-oriented display, unlike the squarer screens on past models. This was a change made to accommodate Web browsing and picture viewing. (You can only transfer pictures to the 8700, though, as Blackberrys still don't have cameras.)

Colors, fonts and screen design, coupled with the relatively high-resolution, high-color LCD make the display very easy to read.

One nice new feature: the screen automatically senses ambient light conditions and adjusts the backlight to suit. Lights under the keyboard also come on automatically when ambient levels fall below a certain threshold. Past models had a button you could push to adjust lighting. This is more convenient and could save battery power as well.

Interface
RIM has made a few little changes to the physical interface.

The most notable is the addition of dedicated phone Send, End and mute buttons—present on the 7100 phones but absent on most of the PDA-shaped models, which RIM calls wireless handhelds. The End button also doubles as a shortcut to the device's home page.

The QWERTY keyboard has a subtly different feel. The keys are a little smaller than recent models we've reviewed, also a slightly different shape, and they're beveled differently. It seems to work just as well as past BlackBerry keyboards, though, which is to say surprisingly well given its size.

The keyboard has an embedded number pad shaped like a telephone keypad. Instead of the numbers running across the top row of keys, they're on the W, E, R, S, D, F, Z, X and C keys. The number keys are light grey on the 8700 to set them off from the rest of the black keys.

These keys work as a number pad when the unit is in phone mode and as letters when in text mode. Punctuation marks are in similarly non-standard locations on the keyboard layout, and there's a dedicated speaker phone button in the bottom right corner.

Otherwise, the physical interface is identical to earlier BlackBerrys, with the thumbwheel and Back button on the right-hand edge.

The software interface, besides the updated fonts and screen design, also remains the same as on most BlackBerrys. You turn the thumbwheel to scroll up and down menus or back and forth across the page from one link or application icon to another, and press in on the thumbwheel to make selections. The Back key moves you back through menu levels or back through previously viewed Web pages when you're browsing.

Performance
The difference inside the 8700 from past models is also incremental rather than a big bang of a change.

For the first time, RIM is using an Intel processor, the 312 MHz PXA901. This makes it faster than past handheld models, the company says. We could see some difference when downloading and viewing e-mail attachments.

The faster processor and 64 MB of onboard flash memory and 16MB of DRAM also means the 8700 can support more and more compute-intensive applications.

In testing, the standard applications as well as some others that RIM loaded on the unit certainly popped on the screen with no delays, but then we don't remember noticing many processing-related lags with earlier models. Searching for contacts in a large database did seem faster than with previous models tested.

This is also the first BlackBerry to work on Edge networks so many network functions are faster as well. Web browsing on Rogers' Edge network using the standard Internet browser is still painfully slow compared to wired or wireless broadband connections, but browsing using the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) browser to access specially formatted news, sports, weather and other information is noticeably faster than with earlier BlackBerry handhelds. Text-only WAP pages, in some cases, displayed more quickly than graphics-based HTML pages on a broadband connection.

Phone
The 8700 also worked well as a phone, with loud, clear audio in the areas where we tested it on Rogers network. The dedicated Send/End buttons make a small improvement in phone functionality, although they're very thin. And it's still harder to dial a number using the tiny keys in the embedded number pad than it is with the dedicated number pad on cell phone. The integrated speaker phone is impressive—plenty loud enough and not as tinny as most handheld speaker phones.

Some users will dislike the feel of holding a PDA-shaped device against their ear, and not being able to see information on the screen while they're talking on the phone. It's an old and, in my opinion, feeble complaint against these types of smartphones. For one thing, those users always have the option of using the included wired head set or attaching an optional Bluetooth headset.

The 8700 supports Bluetooth 2.0, but is backward compatible to earlier Bluetooth devices. I tested it with a two-year-old Logitech Mobile Pro Headset. Pairing was quick and easy and the headset worked well.

Software
In terms of application functionality, there are a few minor enhancements.

For example, you can now view PowerPoint presentations in color rather than black and white. And the image viewer lets you zoom in and out and rotate images. E-mail functionality is much as it is on other BlackBerrys, though it's arguably easier to read messages because of higher resolution and better fonts and screen design.

RIM argues that the overall improved performance of faster processor, more memory and faster network makes the 8700 ideal for wirelessly-enabled enterprise applications such as sales force automation, field service automation, network and systems management and others.

The 8700 naturally works with the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution, which provides the kind of security features big companies demand, as well as functionality such as single mailbox integration and remote address book look-up.

Bottom line
Nobody with a recent BlackBerry model needs to rush out and upgrade to an 8700, but for companies in the process of upgrading older BlackBerrys or adding new users, the 8700 should definitely be on the list, especially if they already run custom applications through a BlackBerry server, or expect to in the future

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