My engineering friends tell me that a big disadvantage of PDA's with phones in them (like Treo and BB) on CDMA is that you can't be using voice and data simultaneously. So, for example, if you are doing email, your phone calls will goto Voice Mail instead of your phone and conversely if are talking on the phone, your emails won't be delivered to you until you are done- nor will you get a notification. The former is much more irritating and worse than the latter.

This is not true with GSM.

I confirmed this with my friends at Good and another friend who has the Treo on Sprint: he can not talk and receive data at the same time. This will not be unique to Palm devices- it is a CDMA issue.

I'm attempting to find out more because I've been a die hard CMDA addict for ever but recently have begun using the 7100g on Cingular and like to be able to talk and do email/IM/apps at the same time.

Can anyone shed light on this- pretty sad for CDMA.
I would make the BB a lot less useful of a device if true (whcih so far it appears to be).

-Marc