RIM BlackBerry 8830 Review

Messaging:

The 8830, as with all BlackBerries, comes with a built-in email client which you can use to connect to any email address given to it. For the test, we used a Comcast email account to test the capabilities. Reconciliation between the mailbox and the 8830 is done automatically but you do have the option to force reconciliation if you want to make sure there are no new emails. There was a 3 minute delay between the time that an email arrived at the Comcast mailbox and when the 8830 picked it up in both the auto and manual reconciliation. There are no options that allowed us to change the reconciliation period. Once seen, the emails were categorized by time received and then into days. You could delete emails from the handheld only or choose to delete them from both the handheld and the mailbox. The only thing that is quite upsetting is that a multi delete could not be found. The only option was to select a date and delete all prior emails. This would defeat the purpose of such a wonderful email client especially if there were important emails that you would want stored on the phone.

There are actually two mailboxes that you can open. One is strictly for emails while the other shows all messages, SMS, MMS, and email.

When texting, you do have the help of AutoText, even though you have a full keyboard. This helps you in that if you misspell a word, say ahve instead of have, it will correct it for you automatically. You can even add in your own special words so that you have safety incase you ever mistype in the same manner.


Connectivity:

Even though this is a CDMA phone, you do have world coverage thanks to it being a dual mode phone. The 8830 works on CDMA 800/1900 bands where it can, but if you were in a country where you cannot connect to a CDMA network, it will try to connect to GSM 900/1800 bands to give you coverage. Verizon’s roaming partner overseas is Vodafone to which Verizon has locked the phones to. You can opt not to purchase a world package and therefore you will not receive a SIM for use.

Sadly, the 8830 is not Wi-Fi capable but makes up for it by offering 3G on the EV-DO network.

To connect to a computer, you can either use the USB cable or Bluetooth. Even though there is a music player, RIM has decided to not include an A2DP profile so you can’t use your Bluetooth headsets to listen to music in stereo.


Internet:

With the internet as big as it is, you can’t forget to include even a basic web browser with your phone and RIM certainly hasn’t. The 8830 uses the regular BlackBerry browser which, while it isn’t terrible, leaves something to be desired. We had no problems loading pages, even www.myspace.com, but it would change the format into a long list which means that there is a lot of scrolling to be done and the trackball is the only means you have to do this.



Opening web pages didn’t take too long. Myspace took only about 15 seconds to load which is great considering how much data there is on a page.