RIM Blackberry 8700g review

With its silver detailing, the new Blackberry has a bit more style than its workmanlike predecessor. It's also slimmer, making it much easier to grip when you're using it as a phone.

The main thing that strikes you about the 8700g is its screen. The 8700g has a 65,000 colour, 360 x 240 resolution display, offering far more detailed colour and a higher resolution than previous Blackberry models.

The traditional Blackberry interface is still intact. You use the thumbwheel on the right of the handset to scroll through menu options, and click to select. However, this is the first Blackberry with a full-sized keyboard to have dedicated call answer and end buttons, so you no longer have to fiddle with the thumbwheel to answer calls or hang up. Call quality is also superb.

Flashy interface aside, the 8700g is still primarily a messaging device and here it excels. You don't have to log on to your mail server and periodically check for emails - they are delivered to the handset as soon as they're sent. The email client is logical and easy to use, and when you check your messages, you have the option to read each mail in small chunks to save time downloading. Typing messages is fairly easy, although the handset's reduced width means the keys are more tightly spaced than on previous Blackberry handsets.

The email client also deals remarkably well with attachments. The handset supports all the normal Windows image formats, as well as Powerpoint, Word, Excel and PDF documents. Word documents lose their formatting and the handset can only display the text of PowerPoint or PDF files, but Excel spreadsheets are displayed in a clear table format. You can't use the Blackberry to edit documents as you can on a Windows Mobile PDA, however. The 8700g also has a built-in web browser, but it doesn't make as a good job of formatting pages to fit the screen as Pocket Internet Explorer.