When it comes to making his employees work more hours than they are paid for my boss is something of a genius. Instead of opting to provide us all with laptops and mobile phones to help us deal with client queries at evenings and weekends he signed us all up for BlackBerry Smartphones. Not so bad some would say; however despite the pleas for the provision of the new state of the art Pearl, he equipped us all with the 8700v and this will be the subject of my review.

When opening up the standard box when it finally arrived on my desk there was a note firmly stuck to the inside from our rather cheeky IT administrator stating that setting it up was easy and something of a do it yourself start up guide to the pieces of equipment in the box which was considerably easier than following the overly complicated and jargon ridden BlackBerry instruction manual that was frankly as clear as mud. Following the do it yourself instructions was as easy as had been claimed, with the 8700v connected to the PC via a USB cable and the installation disk inserted into the drive. After this was done it was just a case of confirming my Outlook license number, my username on the server and following several onscreen instructions that finalized the whole process. Once this was done the 8700v was synchronised to my PC and all of my contacts, diary appointments and emails contained within my inbox were automatically transferred over.

Wireless Email
Organiser
Internet Browser
Mobile Phone
SMS
MMS
Address Book
Memo Pad
Calculator
Alarm Clock

The email and mobile phone applications are the most used on my 8700v and they have been nothing but highly impressive. In areas where I would struggle to receive any form of signal the signal strength on the 8700v is at the maximum, with emails sent and received without any sort of time lag or delay. When making calls the ability to alter volume using the track wheel is good and the sound produced by the earpiece is clear with virtually no distortion. I would point out that when in the middle of an office environment there is a slight buzzing as other electrical devices interfere with the 8700v but once outside it is clear as a whistle.

To sum up I am delighted with my Smartphone, the 8700v is nice and compact weighing only 139g and being only 11 x 6.9 by 1.9 cm in size. The polyphonic ringtones and the ability to assign different tones to emails, SMS, and MMS messages mean that I don’t have to constantly lock and unlock the keypad every time I receive something. If I had to find any sort of flaw with the design or built in technology I would have to say that the QWERTY keypad is just too small with too much compacted into such a tiny space. When typing I struggle to hit the N key meaning frequent typing errors.