BlackBerry 6210 / 6230
Average Ratings
Organizer yes, phone NO
I got this phone to organize my life. It did that pretty well. The only thing problem is, I feel like I should have to carry an extra REAL phone to make phone calls.
This blackberry is absolutely horrible as a phone. Very few phone features, and the sound quality is horrible. If you are riding in a car, forget hearing the other party most of the time.
Never again. I'm going back to a Motorola flip phone.
A great all in one device
Been using the 6210 for about a week now - and really am impressed with the unit. I work in the middle of a large office building w/ no windows in my area and I get strong signal everywhere - even in the elevators where other phones have failed. AT&T has been a dream to work with. I got this off eBay - but activating the data plan was a piece of cake.
Haven't had any problems with sound or volume. Wish the ringer could be set louder - but I can certainly live with it. My biggest complaint is that it is impossible to dial phone numbers that are spelled out words since there aren't the standard 3 letters above each number. So good luck trying to figure out numbers like 1-800-GETALIFE.
Unit is fast - syncs perfectly, data access is quick both browsing the web and email send and receive. Don't expect to browse the web like your computer - you will be seeing the same type of contect that you see on a web-enabled phone - just on a wider page - but for basic data access it works great.
While my Palm or Pocket PC can do more (i.e. spreadsheets, checkbook etc). The advantage of having my calendar, tasks and contacts on my hip - and always available - makes this a Palm replacement for me. Once you get the thumbboard down and add some autotext entries - you can keep track of just about everything you HAVE to have - easily and fast.
Speakerphone would be nice - but not enough of an option for me to nick it in my score.
Wish it was a little thicker - only so I could hold it on my shoulder - no hands - a little easier.
Going to start saving my pennies for the color version - this really is a great device. So far the best AT&T phone I have tried so far (tried the Siemens s46, c56, s56, Mot t721, SE 306)
Blackberry 6230
This was my 1st Black Berry I try ed it out for 2 months I went back to the old type of cell phone.
The Blackberry is a pain to use trying to get to the correct function make you think to hard to get the simple things done as check you mail make phone call.
If you going to place a phone call when you are driving don't it takes to long to unlock the phone and find the function and the phone number in the addrest book if you did get this done with out crashing the car you just been lucky.
I was lucky but luck will run out.
I don't know about the other type of hand helds but this one is a pain.
A Half-Brained Design
This device and those like it are poorly designed overpriced pieces of nonsense. RIM is laughing all the way to the bank from this nice scam they've pulled over on the corporate email market. Take a Palm III, install a worse OS, stick a GPRS modem and thumb board on it, and charge as much as a high-end PocketPC. Brilliant!
Okay, with that out of my system there are a few pros to these things. It's a no-brainer system for getting email and web wirelessly. Can't argue with that. The thumb board makes it very practical to password-protect the thing. The jog dial makes one-handed operation practical.
Now the cons. As a phone these things stick like roadkill. Skunk roadkill. The speaker cannot be turned up load enough for noisey environments. The numeric section of the thumb board is very hard to see in low light. The device hardly has enough CPU horsepower to clearly run a phone call and run the modem at the same time, resulting in the audio cutting in and out even when you have a full signal. If the device is locked and you get a call, you cannot change the call's volume or hang up unless you enter your password to unlock it. Using a phone while driving is dangerous enough. Trying to use this as a phone while driving could very well get you killed, headset or not.
It isn't a very good PDA either, the biggest problem being that the Address Book only supports one quarter the address fields and only half the phone number fields that Outlook does. No support for the Category field either. Pretty lame.
If you're thinking about spending your own money on a Blackberry, my advice is don't. Spend the money on a Bluetooth phone and a good data plan. Use that as a wireless modem for a PocketPC, Palm, or PC. That is unless you just can't live without your email IV'd into your brain.
Great device
I am using th Rogers AT&T device. If you like the Blackberry interface, you will like this as well. The internet is great. And as a phone, the voice quality is good, it does let in a abit more background noise than I like. Easy to use good reception. Smaller than other similar devices 6710 etc..... Helps keep me organized, wich is no small feat!
