BlackBerry 8820, A Few Weeks Later

I've had the BlackBerry 8820 for a few weeks now. I've even managed to subject it to what is, for me at least, the ultimate test of a mobile device's utility: business travel. Several times, in fact. The conclusion at this point? I've seen a few microscopic cracks develop, metaphorically speaking, but all in all the unit's held up my initial opinion of it well and proven to be a very good fit for me.

I continue to love the keyboard and all the other things I wrote about in the 8820 review I posted a few weeks ago. In fact, I've continued to find things that are pretty cool and well designed. As an example, just today (on yet another business trip) I discovered that entering two spaces while typing an email or whatever will result in the software inserting a period after the last non-space character you typed, leaving the two spaces in place, and then turning on the capitalization in preparation for starting a new sentence. For those of us that routinely use two spaces between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of another (most typists I suppose) that's a great feature. Small and simple I know, but as I think I mentioned in my review: the Devil is in the the details.

The truth is that I think at least some, if not all, of the little irritations I've found are probably based more in the service (AT&T, AKA "The Death Star") than in the BlackBerry hardware or software. These annoyances are things like the occasional delays in receiving email. I don't know where that problem lies, honestly. It could be in the BES, it could be AT&T, who knows. I suppose it could in theory be the operating system or messaging client as well, but that seems a bit unlikely. Speaking of the messaging client, one thing it does do better than any other mobile device I've used, especially the Windows Mobile-based 8125, is let you know when an email failed to send. The 8820 makes it very apparent when a send failure occurred, and that's something that was a huge irritation to me on the WinMob device.

Probably the other biggest irritation to me on the BlackBerry at the moment is my complete inability to make any of the mobile Twitter clients work. I've tried TinyTwitter, TwitterBerry, and one other one that I can't remember right now and none of them will connect successfully to the Twitter service from my 8820. I don't know why this is, I've been completely unable to find any information or solutions about it, but my strong suspicion is that it has something to do with AT&T's MEdia Net network structure. A minor annoyance at best, but an annoyance just the same. Fortunately, GoogleTalk takes up a lot of the slack.

All in all, I have to say I'm pretty happy with the 8820.