[jyl]

The newest Blackberry 8700 is said to be a much improved phone, from people I know that have it.

Blackberries are the gold standard if your primary desire is to get/send email. You don't need an in-house Blackberry server. They are also relatively compact and more rugged than a Treo etc.

But if you primarily want to make voice calls, then the Blackberry isn't the best choice. And of course it lacks camera, MP3, and other consumer doo-dads.

I've been using Blackberry since the little pager-sized model. I ignore (almost all) voice calls and have trained almost everyone to send me an email if they need to reach me. Quite nice.

P.S. The biggest problem with the pre-8700 Blackberry, as phones, is that the output volume is too low. It's hard to hear the other caller when on a noisy street, even using an earpiece. I'd want to make sure they fixed that.

P.P.S. I don't know much about the Blackberry model that lacks a full QWERTY keyboard. I'm dubious, though. Supposedly it predicts the word you are trying to type, but how well does that work if you use a specialized vocabulary, abbreviations, lots of proper product or person names, etc? Seems like a PITA just to save a bit of device width.