RIM Blackberry 7100T

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.

RIM's BlackBerry push email service has won it plenty of friends. It's simple but effective - just register your email account with your mobile network and it'll send (or "push") the emails directly to your phone.

At first glance, the quad-band 7100t appears to have a standard phone keypad, but look a little closer and you'll see that it has its letters arranged qwerty fashion, with two letters per key. Innovative perhaps, but, like its Vodafone cousin, the 7100v, it proved to be a bitch to master, and the SureType predictive text function just confused us more.

But master it we did after a couple of days, and then it all started to make sense. Email is simple to set up, either on the handset (fiddly with the scroll wheel) or via the Net (easy peasy), with options to pull in up to ten POP3 or IMAP4 email accounts.

Be warned, though: using it soon becomes so essential that it's easy to see why some wag (possibly in RIM's marketing dept) nicknamed it "CrackBerry". But while it does forward your emails, it only does so at 15-minute intervals - enough to keep in touch, but not great for conversations.

You can view attachments too - Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Reader PDFs, with 32MB storage - though you can't edit them. The 7100t also comes with Bluetooth, but bizarrely, only for headsets and not for transferring data - very odd for a business-centric device like this.

As a phone with BlackBerry email this is fine - once you get used to the key layout - but as a mobile office device, it's still a little wanting.