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 BlackBerry 8700gT-Mobile's BlackBerry 8700g makes your life easier without weighing you down. Price: $299
by Mark Spoonauer 
Instead of trying to be all things to all people, the slim but powerful BlackBerry 8700g from T-Mobile does a few things and does them well: push e-mail, Web browsing, and instant messaging. It's also a pretty good organizer. The 8700g isn't perfect, but you won't find an easier-to-use or more capable smart phone for $299.
Weighing a refreshingly light 4.7 ounces and measuring less than an inch thick, the 8700g is more pocket friendly than the Treo 650. The tapered design makes this device a pleasure to hold, and the traditional scroll wheel and back button on the right side are easy to find without looking. The QWERTY keyboard is flatter than the Treo, but the keys themselves are bigger. Within minutes we were typing at a fairly rapid rate. Thanks to the high-resolution, 320 x 240-pixel landscape display, everything from Web pages to JPEG attachments looked crisp and bright. To help attain its excellent 16 days of standby time, the 8700g features a light sensor that automatically adjusts the screen and keyboard lighting based on the conditions. Intel's 312-MHz XScale processor makes operating this BlackBerry a breeze; programs opened and closed quickly. Combined with the relatively speedy EDGE connectivity, the 8700g was actually faster when it came to downloading Web pages than T-Mobile's Windows Mobile-powered MDA. Why? The included J2ME software is just more efficient. As with all BlackBerrys, the 8700g's specialty is e-mail. The device supports up to ten e-mail accounts, and we like how you can choose from multiple "sent from" addresses with a single click. On the corporate side, support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, and Lotus GroupWise comes standard. Unlike the 8700c, the 8700g works seamlessly with Yahoo Mail. That means both real-time message delivery and wireless synchronization; when you delete a message on the handheld, you won't have to delete it again when you get back to your PC. The 8700g supports most major attachment types, including DOC, XLS, PPT, JPEG, and PDF. It supports PowerPoint attachment viewing (up to 8MB in size) for all T-Mobile BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server users with the BES 4.0 service pack upgrade or later. The phone can't properly format PDF documents, but you can read text and view embedded TIFF images. The built-in instant messaging client, another feature the 8700c lacks, works with AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. This BlackBerry did a fairly good job when we tried Yahoo, with sent messages arriving to our buddies in 4 to 7 seconds. IMs took a bit longer to arrive on the device, however, ranging from 12 to 20 seconds. That's not quite instant, but it gets the job done if you have a little patience. As a phone, the BlackBerry 8700g delivered average voice quality, with some of our test voicemail messages sounding a bit muffled. On the plus side, the speaker is loud enough that you don't have to jam the device in your ear to hear the other end of the call. We like that there's Bluetooth on board for pairing this device with a wireless headset (we tried the Plantronics Discovery 645), but you can't voice dial. Some may lament the 8700g doesn't have a digital camera or MP3 player, but we don't think BlackBerry buyers really care much about multimedia. We're more concerned with the sometimes spotty coverage of T-Mobile's network; a few times the device couldn't register a single bar of signal strength in areas of Manhattan and New Jersey, greeting us with the following message when we attempted to use the browser: "You are not currently in an area that can handle data communication." Fortunately, these occasions were rare. When you consider that T-Mobile offers instant messaging and better Yahoo Mail integration in the same lightweight design as the 8700c, and charges $19.99 per month for its data plan (when added to a voice plan) versus Cingular's $44.99, the 8700g is a good value. It's less versatile than T-Mobile's MDA but it's a better performer. BlackBerry 8700g Specifications
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