I was there too and I am equally impressed with the 8700. I made a call to my voice mail and recorded how it performed in what can only be called a very noisy environment and it sound really good. I will post it tomorrow when I am back in L.A. It is surprisingly small. THe keyboard is a little harder to ype on without making mistakes because the keys are closer together but they are as large so that helps. I would say easier to type on than the Treo 650 or HP 6500 but harder than the 7290. I had the HP 6500 with me and it looks huge next to the 8700 which really suprised me. The screens were about equal in brightness and I would say the 8700 is slightly more yellow (I could be wrong because it adjusts to ambient light and in other lighting it might look different). I spent a good deal of time talking to the folks there and I have a lot of things to report that I will share later. Bottom line..I am glad I will be getting one.

Edit: There is some really interesting capability in the Hermon chip set that Cingular, Rim and Intel folks shared with me.