The night before I left the country my BlackBerry 8830 showed up, and I only had about half a day in the airport to play with it. There are plenty of other reviews out there, so I'll touch on what I haven't seen discussed anywhere.
The SIM Card
In my earlier post I was wrong about the SIM card going into the microSD slot. Granted I didn't bring the manual with me, but blindly cramming the SIM card into a crack above the battery was not what I expected. It only took 4 tries before I inserted it correctly and then I discovered that I only had voice service in Lima. I was out of luck in Cusco1, and there is no data coverage yet anywhere in Peru. At $1.29/min I wasn't planning on making many calls anyways. Ah the joys of being SIM locked.
Media Player and microSD
The 8830 has a slot for a microSD card and I picked up a generic 2GB microSD card for $25 from MicroCenter that works great and included a SD adapter. If you want to use Windows Explorer to browse the card you'll need to enable Mass Storage Mode2.
Whenever I connect BB to my computer I'm prompted to enter my password and confirm that I want to activate Mass Storage Mode. You cannot access files on the media card from the BB while it's connected to the computer.
The BB Media Manager is a Front Row-ish interface for all of your video and audio needs. There's just one problem - it sucks. Everything slows down while it's open, and when you're playing a mp3 or video the device slows down to a crawl. Alt+Escape task switching takes 2-5 seconds to show the hourglass, and another 5-10 seconds before you see the ribbon. The mp3 player doesn't let you fast forward or rewind, instead you select the timeline and roll the trackball. Great, right?
Wrong. There is no acceleration with the trackball, meaning no matter how furiously you spin the trackball, the response will always be directly proportional to the sensitivity setting (unlike the iPod click wheel). Listening to an audio book and want to skip back a few seconds to catch something you missed? Bummer. The amount of time you skip forward or back in a song is fixed, and appears to be the length of the song divided by 22 or 23. That means a 4 hour mp3 will skip in roughly 12 minute increments.
Without an extra media card you'll be limited to files 2.86MB or smaller, allegedly because of the filesystem used on the device.
Poor Manufacturing
I'm not terribly impressed with the quality of the manufacturing. My 8703e felt rock solid, and my 7250 was a tank. The keyboard on an 8700 is spaced well with great tactile feedback 3.
As I said before, the 8830 keyboard is miserable, but at least that was by design. After breaking it in for a week the keys have started to make a popping sound which is obnoxious and makes it the loudest BB keyboard I've ever used. The side buttons are hard to use, requiring a direct, firm press.
The 2.5mm headphone jack has a lot of space around it, as if the plan was to use a 3.5 mm jack and someone changed their mind at the last minute4.
The trackball is a little loose, and I find even with the sensitivity/precision set to 100 it's still not terribly precise when used with a cursor or while navigating lists. Notice the gap around the trackball which shifts slightly as you push it. I haven't seen this with Cingular's 8800.
Final Take
Flaws aside, it's a slim device with a crisp display and I'm sold on the trackball. I have another 8703e that I'm still using and it feels gigantic in my hand after holding the 8830. Much of of what I like about the 8830 are features of OS 4.2 as opposed to the device itself, and I expect that future OS updates will resolve the software issues I mentioned above. I'm fairly sure that the Curve will be my ideal device, but I don't know I'll be able to wait for a Verizon release. Don't hold your breath for a Curve from Verizon any time soon, I've heard it will be at least a year and even then will depend on sales of the GSM version.
- The tenth largest city in Peru according to the World Gazetteer [back]
- See BB KB13564, How to manually turn on, or turn off mass storage mode [back]
- The 8300 (Curve) is supposed to have a similar keyboard to the 8700, but I haven't used one yet [back]
- The Curve has a 3.5 mm stereo jack [back]