Both of these 4.7-ounce devices are a little smaller than previous slab-style Blackberry devices, with a beautiful, backlit, 2.6-inch, 320-by-240-pixel screen. Text, photos, and Web pages all look great on the bright, 65k-color screen. Keys on the QWERTY keyboard are small but distinct.
The 8700g adds a few small things to the 8700c's feature set. Yahoo! Mail accounts are supported easily and seamlessly, along with the POP3, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and AOL (but not Hotmail) supported by the 8700c. I set up my Yahoo! account in about 60 seconds using an icon on the 8700g's main screen without ever touching my PC, and messages started showing up within 10 minutes. It doesn't get easier than that. Each of your e-mail accounts (up to ten) appears as a separate icon on the 8700g's home screen, and they're also consolidated under an omnibus "Messaging" icon.
The 8700g shares both the 8700c's very good support for reading Microsoft Word and Excel attachments and its troubled PDF support. (You can read most of the text on PDFs, but mangled fonts and misplaced images are frequent.) T-Mobile's version of the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) also lets you view JPEG attachments as thumbnails within messages and see PowerPoint attachments. You can view entire slides as images and read the associated text. (Cingular is turning on those features as well, RIM said.)
T-Mobile adds the popular OZ instant-messaging client. This allows IMing on the AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! and MSN networks (though the AIM buddy list is limited, as usual, to the "Mobile Device" group). Cingular charges extra for an IM client.
Just like the 8700c, the 8700g has a Class 10 EDGE modem built in to speed up e-mail attachments and Web browsing. T-Mobile doesn't support using the 8700g as a laptop modem, so I couldn't get solid EDGE speed test results, but Web page load times were identical to those I saw on the 8700c, and decent for an EDGE modem.
My 8700g came loaded with Google Local on Mobile and Handmark Pocket Express information applications. Blackberry devices have fully made the transition from e-mail-only devices to real smartphones, with hundreds of applications available and 64MB of storage for programs and data. They lack only multimedia apps like music and video players, although the first BlackBerry streaming video player, from Sona Mobile, is scheduled to arrive this summer. Performance isn't great—the 8700g and 8700c performed like midrange feature phones rather than like high-end smartphones on JBenchmark's Java benchmark tests—but maps look gorgeous on the 320-by-240 screen.
Phone reception on this quad-band device is in the average, acceptable range. As with the 8700c, the earpiece is loud and the speakerphone is very loud. I didn't hear the dropouts or audio fluctuations that I did on the 8700c—there was some background hiss and a bit of scratchiness, but calls came through solidly. Both Logitech and Plantronics Bluetooth headsets paired and connected without a problem. Like all other BlackBerry devices, the 8700g is still missing voice dialing.
Battery life, at 7 hours 7 minutes, was right in line with that of the BlackBerry 8700c and the 7100g, both of which use similar bright color screens. Earlier BlackBerry models, such as the 7290, lasted longer because their transreflective screens didn't drain as much power.
On T-Mobile, the BlackBerry 8700g's competitors are the MDA and the Sidekick II. While the MDA is a more powerful multimedia device with a bigger keyboard and Wi-Fi, the 8700g is much easier to use for e-mail and Web browsing, and gets slightly better phone reception. The Sidekick II is a terrific personal device, but it doesn't support business e-mail, and it generally looks less professional than the 8700g. For e-mail-focused users on T-Mobile, this is the sweetest berry of them all.
SPEC DATA :
- Service Provider: T-Mobile
- Operating System: BlackBerry OS
- Screen Size: 2.75 inches
- Camera: No
- Bluetooth: Yes
- Web Browser: Yes
- Network: GSM
- Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
- High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE
- Notes: 320 x 240, 65k color screen
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