Well, I spent the long vacationy weekend with the Blackberry.
What it does well (receive and send company e-mail via wireless modem and our own Exchange server) it does very well. I was able to fritter away a good chunk of Monday morning reading and responding to mail. Wow.
And the battery life has been great, on a par with the Palm.
Everything else, though, is feeling like a step backward, like going from the Win9X interface to the Win3X interface. Ugly and crude.
I like the keyboard. And the scroll-click button (and escape button)_work well for that modality. But, frankly, it’s like a full-screen DOS ap. Scroll up, scroll down, scroll cursor, scroll page. Hit Enter.
The Palm’s stylus allows faster, easier menu selections, instant jumping from one part of the page to another, etc. The Palm’s (limited) font/typeface support makes things look better. And the incredible wealth of Palm aps lets you tune the thing to what you want.
I plan on continuing to eval this unit through at least this week (maybe for the rest of the month, at which point we’ll have a departmental budget). But I’m also going to start looking at wireless handheld units (primarily in the Palm family, but I might look at some PocketPC units, if the battery life is reasonable). The e-mail interface will probably not be so tightly bound, but at least I’ll feel like I’m in the 21st Century.