I say the 8703. My 8703 had a few keys on the keypad not working, and I was within my Verizon 30 day return period, so I went in to exchange it. I noticed the 8830 there, and I did my exchange for it instead. I was very unhappy in a matter of hours. The memory is severely lacking, and you can only use the storage card to hold media; you can't save and run programs from it. That leaves you with about 20mb of free memory for your own personal use. To top that off, there is a memory leak of sorts. 5-6 hours after purchasing the unit, my memory had dropped to 14mb free, and I hadn't installed any apps, nor had I even transferred my address book and calendar.
Where did the memory go? I have no idea, but I did a google search on the subject and found that people across the country are having the same problems.
Other things I didn't like had to do with the form of the phone. The casing is just too damned slippery, I dropped it 3 times during one handed use purely because of the material they used. The track ball is superior for general navigation, but the scroll wheel definitely wins for one handed use, just due to it's position on the phone. The keyboard was a mess by my standards as well. I lost a good 10-20 wpm on my BB typing speed just due to the way the keys are shaped and how crowded together they are. The keypad backlight is awful too.
The media player, and a few tiny upgrades in the OS weren't enough for me to overlook all the things I didn't like. After my foray with the 8830, I was back into an 8703 in less than 24 hours.
It's your personal opinion obviously, but my opinion is to go with the 8703.
Tom
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