Very well said !
The BlackBerry is a stellar device. Engineered to always perform in an extremely consistent fashion, with rock solid reliability. The type of reliable performance the competitors can only dream of. After trying all the rest & switching to BlackBerry, I remain very impressed at the excellence demonstrated by the BlackBerry platform.

i had a pearl ... abandoned it and went for 750. loved the form - the rubberised feel. but guess what ..2 days in a week the emails simply would'nt come thru! Gave it back and got a new replacement. Installed one (just one) 3rd party application and guess what - the volume buttons stopped functioning! Had to hard reset.

last straw was 2 weeks back when all the emails in my SENT folder simply dissappeared ... vaporised. I called up treo and they said they would like to have my email address for "testing"!! What kind of "tests" did they do before launching the product?

Worst part is when travelling overseas, i would always have that nagging fear that the machine would conk out on me ... never felt that way with a blackberry. Sold off my Treo ... good luck to Palm - back to my Pearl.

Waiting for 8800 to be launched here ..(i'm in hong kong) - wish i could buy it online. As of now, i dont know where.

I just picked up the 8800 yesterday and have been very happy with it. I came from a 7280 (ooold) and had to decide between a 750 and a 8800.

I work in real estate and that business seems to have become Palm centric (now moving to windows mobile) but on a daily basis I have agents coming to me to help restore their devices, fix it, stop endless loops, etc. My blackberry has always run flawlessly and I can rely on it to work when I need it which is why I chose to go with the 8800. Frankly I wasn't expecting much of a change but I was blown away by the quality of the device. My only disappointment was the lack of 3G (since I tether my mac often) however the reality is that for most webpages I am looking at EDGE works just fine.

All in all I am very happy with the device and chose this after looking at the 750 and the BlackJack (which, because it only runs Windows for Smartphones and not Windows Mobile isn't really a good device for this business)

I've got a problem... My name is Stacey and I'm a gadget junkie. <Hi Stacey...>

I've been a gadget junkie for at least 15 years now, and I've had just about every handheld platform that you can imagine (Newton OS, Linux (various Zaurii), every iteration of WindowsCE, PalmOS, Symbian, etc.) as well as numerous devices that ran variations of these OSs.

That said, I can safely say that the Blackberry experience for me has been amazingly similar to my Newton experience... it's intuitive and it 'just works'. Yes, it has some limitations, granted. I own hundreds of dollars of Windows Mobile program licenses and PalmOS program licenses... those I never use anymore and have written them off as unrecoverable at this point because I don't want to move back to either of those platforms. I wish there were mobile versions of logmein and sling for the blackberry, but I can do without those so long as my blackberry keeps me communicating, easily and reliably. The OS is easy to use once you get over the hump (this took a newbie like my 'significant other' all of about a week - now I can't pry her 8703e from her beautiful hands, much to my chagrin)...

My latest romp outside the blackberry universe was a dance with a beautiful Symbian woman (Sony Ericsson p990i - because I was hoping to get BBC working on it and have the flexibility of a decent handheld OS as well as a really usable camera). That lasted literally 48 hours. It was just too much effort to get everything I needed to 'just work' done. Symbian on that chick was so bug ridden, I wanted to just cry at the end of it.

Anyway, take my advice and those of my bretheren here. If you need a reliable communications device that will keep you on top of your business, friends and life, you could do a lot worse than an 8800 or a Pearl. The experience is really unmatched.

All that said, you all know I'm gonna get my fidgety hands on an iPhone at some point.

Greets,
Stac

Thanks to all those that replied. I have the answer, and of course I will stay with my 8700 BB. I just wish RIM would have come out with a camera long ago and make a more comfortable phone to hold. That is the only two things the Treo has to offer that is better than the BB. Other then that I love the BB. Still waiting for T-Mobile to come out with the 8800 or 9XXX series.

You're quite right about the form of the Treo fitting to the hand very well and better than the BB. While I'm glad to see choices in the market for QWERTY devices, most have gone in the direction of producing a completely flat back which fits the hand like a square in a round hole. Since these [the housings] are just molded plastic products, not much is required to come to terms with this, yet no one really is. Let's hope that Waterloo is listening and adapts.

Vote for Blackberry!

the keys on a Treo are way too small for easy usage.

you cannot be more right on the money about the comfort of holding a treo in your hands, it just feels very natural, with added rubberish feel of the 750, it feels even better! Hopefully, when the 9xxx comes out, it'll be more contoured to fit your hand better.

I had been using a Treo 650 and finally got tired of the number of times it froze on me or stopped delivering email for extended periods of time (I am using Good for push email). Love the Palm OS, and think its more intutitive to use than the Blackberry, but the freeze-ups are a big challenge.

Ive currently been trying out the BB 8800 and the BB Pearl and I have to say, I like the Pearl a lot more than I thought I would. I love the form factor and the SureType I think works very very well.

One strange thing though - for all of its reputation as the best email device - when I was using my Treo with Good I would get emails within a few seconds of them hitting our server. With my blackberry I sometimes wait 5-15 minutes (!!!) for the emails to come through from the BES server...so far I have actually found the Treo with Good, when working, to be the more corporate strength email service due to this fact...

This isn't completely related, but close enough.

I tore my hair out for weeks deciding whether to get the 700p (Sprint) or the Blackberry 8703e. Anyways, I decided to spring and pay full retail for the 700p and had it for a measly one day before I was calling Palm to return it.

Here's why I disliked it and reutrned it right away:

1) OS Stability/Features

The Treo greeted me right out of the box during configuration with a random reboot followed soon after by a freeze up during a call test.

Web browsing was also a hassle. Since the Palm OS doesn't come with JAVA support, the third-party browsers like Opera will not work unless you install a third party JAVA support app (point #2).

2) The need for lots of third party apps

It seems like in order for the Treo to be a productivity tool, a lot of third party apps are required. The Treo forums has a list of "must have" apps to make the Treo useful and they almost all cost money.

I want something that works and is amazing out of the box. Granted though, the need for apps allows for more customizability.

3) Treo is too much

I want my phones/smartphones to be tools and not toys that need to be pampereed. The Treo from reading other people's testimonials is very fragile, easily breakable in falls and the touch screen is easily scratched.

I felt like I was going to break the thing just making calls on it outside.

I'm already spending $650 on a smartphone, why can't it be durable?


Now, I know that third party apps and such are useful for Blackberries too. But overall I think capability (feature) wise the Treo wins. But for uitlity purposes, the Blackberry is the clear winner.

Once Palm refunds my money, it's going into a Blackberry .

windows mobile just down right has it wrong, i would rather have almost any blackberry over my palm devices. The only way i would recommend a treo over a blackberry is if you just want a smartphone with out the email capability. which kind of defeats the purpose.

I find the time of delivering emails is similar between the blackberry and my treo 750(on cingular)/700w(vzw). I have sent myself numerous test emails to see the time it would take to get it on my device. they would always get it about 20 to 30 seconds before it hits my outlook on my pc. I love that.