Introduction and features

It's nine years old, but the BlackBerry 8700g stille seems almost ahead of its time in some respects. Sure, the 312Mhz and 16MB of RAM (and no camera, despite them becoming popular by this point) date it, but it also came with a number of features that are now commonplace with smartphones.

In 2006 if you wanted a phone that you could send emails from but DIDN'T want it for work, you'd be burned at the stake as a witch, the very idea of typing out emails on a phone seeming an alien concept.

These days many of us have fired off a load of emails before we even really wake up - which, thinking about it, we really should stop doing.

Battery saving tools, an early flight mode, and the ability to download extra applications for the handset all seem familiar today, but when it launched, the 8700g brought some pretty radical features with it.

Original review, published February 2006

Since it first appeared in the USA in 1999, RIM's BlackBerry range has become the de facto worldwide mobile email tool of choice, for both businesses and consumers who are mad about mail.

Key to its success are an easy-to-use 'push' mail client, a small but perfectly-formed keyboard and a large and readable display. The original units resembled more fancy pagers, but today's GPRS-driven BlackBerrys are also fully-fledged mobile phones – the latest of which features quad-band operation for compatibility with many UK and overseas GSM networks.

This particular unit, the 8700g, also sports Bluetooth, Java support,Web-browsing, polyphonic/MP3 ringtones, speakerphone mode and dedicated 'send' and 'end' call-keys.

It has been launched in the UK by O2 and T-Mobile, with a Vodafone version due to be released by the time you read this. But has anything been lost in the rush to make the BlackBerry more of a contemporary mobile phone?

Features

Well, there's certainly no onboard camera, which is a pity because the ability to send picture messages to email or mobile recipients would undoubtedly be appreciated by many.

Hopefully, a future BlackBerry aimed specifically at consumers will incorporate this 'must-have' feature. Cameras have been notably absent on several recently launched business-orientated mobiles due to increasing sensitivity to snap'n'send cameraphones for corporate confidentiality and security.

Not even the BlackBerry-powered Siemens SK65 sports a camera, although it can at least receive MMS messages. So too can the 8700g, although the function wasn't activated on our early review sample.

A new quarter-VGA (320x240) display is one of the 8700g's strong points. Crisp and bright, it's a definite improvement on the dull matt-finished screen of some earlier BlackBerrys. Thanks to RIM's choice of font, fine text is very readable in the default 13-line messaging mode.

Then there's the colourful icon-driven menu system, which is pleasantly-intuitive. Much of the 8700g's functionality is, as with previous models, driven by a side-mounted thumb wheel.

Working in conjunction with the 'back' key located beneath, this is used to select menus and submenus, edit text and activate WAP or web links. It's sensibly positioned too, allowing single-handed operation (provided you're right-handed!).

The full 35-key Qwerty keyboard may look tiny, but don't let that put you off. Even with our large digits we were able to enter text quickly. Some of the keys access multiple characters, which are selected with 'alt', 'symbol' and 'num' shift buttons.

Hold down the alt key while using the thumbwheel, and the cursor can be moved to a specific point in the text for editing. The BlackBerry system is far superior to any predictive or multi-tap entry system we've experienced.

Just underneath the screen are three buttons; between the aforementioned send/end keys is a third that shortcuts to the WAP/web browser. On the non-thumbwheel side of the phone is a socket for a personal hands-free headset, a button that switches between five usage profiles and a USB port.

The charger plugs in here, which also means you can charge the device from a PC using the appropriate cable. Of course, the connection also has data applications – notably synchronisation. On the top of the phone are on/off and microphone-mute buttons.

A handy speakerphone mode can be engaged via the thumbwheel during a call. Should you encounter any problems, you'll be pleased to note that the 8700g has a help system accessible from the main menu.

The main feature of this device is, of course, messaging. Before you can use this, an email account needs to be set up. For professional users requiring access to corporate mail, this would normally be done, on our review sample, by the company's IT department.

But for consumers, O2 has set up a configuration website that gives you an O2 email address or the opportunity to specify your own. All you need do here is enter your email address and the login password – O2 cleverly does the rest, and so there's no need to worry about POP3/SMTP, IP addresses and other techno-wizardry (we trust other networks will provide similar easy set-up options).

If your ISP gives you multiple accounts, we recommend setting up one specifically for the BlackBerry – especially if your main account is plagued by spam (which you'll be paying to receive!). Incoming messages are automatically 'pushed' via GPRS to the device, an 'envelope' icon informing that 'you've got mail' (or text messages, for that matter).

Performance

It's easy to scroll through these messages, and the device will even open some types of attachment (notably JPEG images – which look great on that screen – and the text of Word documents). Embedded hyperlinks (Web or email addresses) are active,while phone numbers are highlighted for phoning or texting at a click of the thumbwheel.

It's also possible to forward emails as text messages – and vice versa. The comprehensive PC-synchronisable address book is restricted only by the phone's 64MB flash-memory (there's, alas, no card slot for expansion). Each entry will store a vast range of information including job title, five phone numbers, fax, email/postal addresses, homepage and even personal notes.

Adding address book-derived email address and phone numbers to outgoing messages and emails is straightforward.

It's also possible to attach files (such as documents created with various third-party applications available for purchase on-line) to emails, or save attachments buried in incoming emails.

Another communication service available on the 8700g is BlackBerry Messenger,which has its own menu icon. But this has nothing to do with internet-based chat programs like ICQ and Windows Messenger.

Instead, it's dedicated to RIM's proprietary 'PIN messaging', which allows you to communicate quickly with other BlackBerry users on the network (making this possible is the fact that every device has a unique PIN, hence the name).

Thanks to a 312MHz Intel PXA901 processor that's faster than what's come before, plus 16MB of RAM, the 8700g fairly whizzes along when its carryin out its assigned tasks. The BlackBerry browser handles both secure WAP and websites, and allows you to define bookmarks for quick access to often-visited sites.

Web pages look surprisingly good and appear fairly quickly, although multiple frames have to be loaded separately.

Other features of note? There's a fully-blown (and PC-synchronisable) appointment-scheduler, alarm clock, the ability to turn off the mobile phone section (great for aircraft use), picture viewer, calculator and a comprehensive search-engine that will examine the entire phone memory for a particular text-pattern or filename.

Only one game (the addictive Breakout-like BrickBreaker) is offered, although others can be added courtesy of Java.

Messaging

The messaging facilities of the 8700g are simply superb. We did find that it took longer for outgoing messages to arrive in the recipient's mail box than it did to receive incoming messages, but that might have been down to network congestion.

WAP and websites were also handled very nicely. As a phone, the 8700g was also found to work well. Call-quality on both sides leaves little room for complaint in terms of clarity, while the hands-free speakerphone is capable of surprisingly-high levels of intelligible sound.

According to the manufacturer's specification, the 8700g's lithium-ion battery will deliver up to 16 days in standby or 4 hours of talk. Our experience falls somewhat short of this claim – from a single charge, we squeezed five days in standby, a handful of text messages, plenty of email activity and just over 20 minutes of calls.

The 8700g's radio then shut off due to low energy reserves, but there was sufficient power for seven further hours of PDA-only functionality!

In all, though, there's little around to touch the BlackBerry as far as mobile messaging is concerned – an opinion merely reinforced by this latest addition to the family.

Verdict

The BlackBerry 8700g came with a number of features that we now take for granted with modern smartphones, and which at the time was often dismissed as too business orientated.

These days we don't think twice about using our phones to send emails and instant messages, and the BlackBerry 8700g's easy method of adding email accounts – without you having to know your POP3 from your SMTP – was revolutionary for the time.

The ability to turn off the phone features of the handset was also noteworthy back then, but nowadays every smartphone comes with a flight mode that lets you continue using the handset when on an aeroplane.

The 8700g's ability to shut off power hungry components is a precursor to the battery-saving features of many smartphones these days as well – if only our handsets could still last five days on a single charge.

The BlackBerry 8700g didn't get everything right, with the lack of a camera showing that it still considered itself an enterprise phone, rather than one aimed at mainstream consumers. Nevertheless, it scored a respectable 85% in issue 141 of Total Mobile.

• This article is part of Phone Week, celebrating the best bits about brilliant smartphones as part of the lead up to the TechRadar Phone Awards. To find out what the iPhone 7 could look like, how a phone could survive in space or just learning how to buy the perfect smartphone for you, bookmark TechRadar's Phone Week hub and check out all the great new content coming throughout the week!

source TechRadar: All latest Mobile phones news feeds http://ift.tt/1HJk8fd