Black Berry Review

I took it upon myself to ferret out all the things I liked and want in the Black Berry 8830. Although since I haven't had it for even a week yet, there are bound to be more things listed in the comments to come.

Things I like:

The battery life seems pretty descent and can be charge via USB or a power cord.
The display is bright enough to see in the sunlight! And it's fairly easy to set the lighting for optimum battery usage.

I can leave programs running and switch to another program, allowing me to listen to scriptures while I read them at the same time, or just come back where I left off.

Email is very very fast. I read the phrase "email push", it must be a way of getting email sent out instead of having it requested some how, it's very nice, I really like that feature. I'm beginning to wonder what the USB cable is for, if I can get power from the wall.

The web speed is ok, not stellar, but it's a phone right?

Media player, it reminds me a little of Windows Media Player, it uses a black background and seems to just work.

The expandable memory, Micro SD, is very affordable at $10 for 2GB!

There are several "themes" available, I hope I can find one that uses a black background so it's easier on my eyes and battery.

It seems pretty rugged, I dropped it once already.

Things I want:

I happened to get the 8830 world edition (vs 8820), so I have every imaginable outlet converter in place of a normal US plug that is folds into itself. Also the 8820 includes the ability to connect via Wi-fi which would have been nice, as it is I'm always restricted by the carrier's idea of what is too large of a file (which seems to be around 2MB).

The trackball is extremely bright, which is fun for the first day, but if you ever have to use this device in dim light or the dark it begins to relentlessly burn a whole in your retina. There is NO way to turn the trackball off (or even down) without destroying the light. Apparently some other Black Berry models gave you some choice, but that feature must have been too confusing for the masses.

Navigation seems to be exclusively done by the trackball, it's like someone took away my tab & function keys in place of a mouse. Today I found that I could "page down" by using the space bar, but I'm still looking for a "page up" key.

The number keys are a little small for a phone. I know I have to give somewhere for the convenience of a full qwerty board...At least it can tell when you want to dial a number.

OK, I have a GPS integrated in this little gem. Lets compare GPS to your windshield wipers. Say you bought a car from a gas staion. You own the entire car and pay for gas. However the gas station but a lock on your wipers so that you couldn't use them unless you paid them $10 a month...But if you broke off the lock, they are yours to use, it's your car right? Don't let them fool you into thinking that there is more to it than this. The government pays my company to provide GPS service to the world free of charge! So why are cell phone companies trying to resell this as if it were their own service, it's annoying.

Only the speaker phone seems to get enough amplitude. If I try to raise the volume for a song I've downloaded, it's not very loud, even through the headset. I also wish I had a headphone jack.

I have found a few programs for SSH, but I haven't found one for VPN yet, I think it would be awesome, if I could do some actual work from this using a vpn/ssh connection! It would even be cool if I still had to use my RSA tokens, I would feel like a secret agent.