BlackBerry 8120

Go into any business and you'll see a BlackBerry within a minute of walking in the door. This Canadian-designed smartphone has taken the business world by storm since the first one hit the streets in 2000.

However, the BlackBerry is not just for business types, and RIM, the company that makes the device, has been plugging away for a few years now with versions aimed squarely at consumer users.

The 8120 is the latest in the Pearl range, which differs from a conventional BlackBerry as it does not have the fully-functional Qwerty keyboard.

Instead, it has a smaller number of buttons and uses T9 predictive text technology (the same used in your phone to make sending text messages easier) to help users speed up the process of composing a mail, or a text, adding a contact or making a note.

Quirky Qwerty

This is where it gets confusing – it doesn't have a Qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't just have a numeric keyboard.

RIM has developed a halfway house between the two, with four rows of five keys, instead of the four rows of thee keys normally found on a phone. Each key has two letters assigned to it, instead of three or four like a phone, or one like a full keyboard.

Technologically, this works well, but in practice it is very confusing, especially to a hardened text message user, who is likely to find the switch very difficult to adapt to.

Keyboard aside, the 8120 has everything you would expect to find on a BlackBerry - a very powerful email application that can be plumbed into your own POP3 or IMAP email (including things like Hotmail and Gmail), and even into your work email, if you really can't live without instant access to all those annual reports and internal memos.

Navigation is handled using a small rollerball in the centre of the phone, and is usually controlled with your thumb to allow for one-handed control of the phone. Applications and functions can be highlighted with the ball and selected by pushing down on it.

It has all the basic PDA functions such as an address book and ‘To Do’ lists. The web browser is poor, but this can easily be replaced with the excellent Opera Mini browser, and there are a growing number of third-party applications for the BlackBerry, including a Facebook client.

Afterthoughts

The more consumer features, such as a media player, video recorder and camera do feel like afterthoughts. The 2 megapixel camera is fuzzy and struggles in both low light conditions and very sunny days.

The video recorder lacks decent editing options and the lack of 3G means emailing your pics or surfing the web will take as long as it does on the iPhone - possibly even longer - and won't look as good.