Blackberry 8830 follow-up review

well, prior to working at my current job, i had always been either Palm or Windows smartphone user. blackberries were for the business elite not the geek, or so it went in my head.  however, after using a blackberry for quite some time i've come to love my blackberry and loathe the palm treo or moto q or other smartphones.  the blackberry just does the job so well.

up until the last year, blackberries were not really the nicest looking phone.  they were big black bricks.  however the introduction of the sleek Pearl and now the 8800 series seems to be changing this mold. 

a while back ago, i posted a review over at techrx ( here ) and gave it a very respectful/great 9.5/10. 



so, after using the blackberry for about 2 months, is it still a 9.5?

i would still say yes.

the battery life is still great.  several users have taken the phone to both japan and england and have still been able to get their email and phone reception. 

just recently i put in a nice ole 1GB microsd card and was able to send music to the blackberry via bluetooth, also you can send mp3 or wav files to it to be used as ringers.  just go to Media > Ringtones and then hit the Menu key > Receive using Bluetooth and send them to the phone or sd card!

bluetooth works great and the speaker phone is very good. 

finally, today i decided to use the phone as modem (PAM) / tethering to my tablet since my internet and cable went down today.  so far works pretty decent, much better than any edge tethering i've done w/tmobile and of course dialup. 

 cnet's bandwidth test shows a connection of:

240.9 Kbps - You

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so far the only lacking items are:

-no real headphone solution for music capabilites (wired that is)

-making reallly long calls (over an hour) can get annoying w/the straight design (but the case w/most smartphones) but normal calls was fine.  more incentive to use a bt headset.

-cost, if you get it w/out any deals as a verizon customer, its will run around $500. 

nonetheless, still my favorite smartphone as of now. 

for comparison, i've used the Treo 755p/700W/700WX/700P/650 (nice phones, short battery life, heavy and clumsy, buggy at times), Moto Q (i hate this phone!! nothing but problems, crappy soft keys, weird button placement, really short battery-worst i've seen), All Blackberries (8703,7103,Pearl), Tmobile MDA/HTC Wizard (my fav windows phone, love full kb and touchscreen, just needs a faster cpu), and i think thats all.   hehe..  i love my phones.. :P