My 8700 gets delivered today - needless to say I can't wait to get home, but I have a question for your guys on how you conditioned your battery. My last 7280 what I was told was to charge it all the way and make sure on the first 5 uses I ran the battery down until i got the low power warning and then to just top it off when i could and use the battery normally. That worked out well for me and I had a great battery life - usually 5-6 days depending on usage if I was away from the office. The woman from cingular told me that when my 8700 comes that I'll need to charge it for 24 hrs before using to ensure optimal battery life. Is this really necessary? I'm thinking that if I get it plugged in at 10 or 10:30 tonight after work that it will be good to go tomorrow morning around 9:30ish and I was planning on running the battery completely down the first 3 to 5 uses. Does that sound like overkill? What have you guys done with yours?

Check this thread out, this is what i've done with all bb models.
Max The Battery Life Of Your New BlackBerry

Nice, that must be where I got that 3 full cycle advice from for my last BB. Thanks

you are very welcome

Please correct me if I am wrong (not that you guys need to be asked!), but isn't conditioning (and memory) a factor for NiCads and not LithiumIons?

check out this link, it has pretty good tips too but refutes the 'priming' and top-off theories:

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

I think the thread posted by likefre explains it well and it has generally worked well for me. I think the one thing that Mark really stresses is that just because you have all the bars lite up doesn't mean the battery is 100% charged. In fact, if you look in the status under options you will see the actually percentage; which I believe can be as low as 80% and still show all the bars.

In regards to the first question, I think overnight charging on the first charge is just fine. That is what I did with mine. I got home around 7pm, connected it to the USB during setup and downloaded a few porgrams and then plug it into the wall overnight. Mine is on it's 3rd charge (last charged Sunday and currently at 55%), and I generally get about 3-4 days and I have had it since 11/30, who knows maybe I will make it all week