Blackberry 8700

Right when I thought I was free, I got pulled right back in!

In 2001, I used to have one of the first BlackBerrys (with full qwerty keyboard, thumbtyping was the term to compose messages). Back then they were called I-pagers. It also had an email address, but they were mainly used to communicate with those others who had them. I had it because of my work. Everyone on my project had one, including the client. The client actually was the phone company who provided the service. Ipaging during a meeting was the norm. People got stuff done on the ipager. We even had/carried our ipagers on weekend nights to communicate with each other: Where are you; is that bar crowded; going home, were the popular pages past 8pm. The lack of SMS was remedied with ipagers. Every now and then there was a work related i-page, which made life unpleasant.

The happiest two days of my life on that project were the day I got my ipager, and the day I returned it.

TODAY, I have a BlackBerry 8700c. I love it. The screen is huge, it renders normal web pages, has support for cookies and most web stuff, has my work email on it, and it synchronizes with corporate calendar. So I can email day-and-night. I can email when I am commuting on the bus. Best of all I can add Google Local (Maps) and Gtalk to it. Both of these applications run on the BlackBerry and are very fast and useful.

Once again I am addicted.

NEXT, I would like to have a model that is slightly thinner and lighter. It would be great if they can add mp3 support, a larger hard disk along with video support and a camera. I hear Apple's iTalk is going to be all that. If so, I might migrate.

emre