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RIM Color BlackBerry 7230 Review

Posted by michael on from the stuff-to-lose dept.

securitas submits this painfully well-linked piece: "eWEEK reviews the RIM BlackBerry 7230 color handheld, Research In Motion's latest combination wireless e-mail/phone/PDA, and the first BlackBerry to feature a full-color display. The tri-band GSM/GPRS J2ME device features a 240-by-160-pixel, 65,000-color display, 16 MB flash +2 MB SRAM, an Intel 386 32-bit chip, SMS, an HTML browser (missing from the preceding BlackBerry 5810), a claimed 4 hours talk/10 days standby removable/rechargeable lithium-ion battery, POP3/IMAP/Exchange/Notes wireless e-mail for up to 10 accounts with file attachment management, security via Triple DES encryption, USB sync/recharging and the usual organizer functions. RIM squeezes it all into a 4.8 oz/136g, 4.4x2.9x0.8 inch/11.3x7.4x2.0 cm package (tech specs at RIM). The BlackBerry 7230 is exclusive to T-Mobile USA until 2004 and costs about $400. With this release, RIM is moving the BlackBerry into the prosumer/consumer market to expand its customer base beyond enterprise users. The release comes amid speculation of BlackBerry doom following RIM's recent patent ruling loss and ahead of the highly anticipated Handspring Treo 600, its direct competition (which includes the MS Pocket PC Phone Edition Smartphone and the Palm Tungsten W). More at Wired News, E-Commerce Times, InfoWorld and Forbes/Reuters."

2 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of stats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Except one. How many patents can this thing infringe upon simultaneously?

  2. RIM software extremely super bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    As part of my job I develop three applications for the Blackberry. All of them involve network access. The experience has been absolutely infuriating. Firstly you must use RIM's JDE which is terrible and slow. Secondly the operating system is a dog. In the 3.3 version the handheld unit would sometimes reboot, and this can take as long as 8 minutes in my experience. In the 3.6 version the network stack crashes itself by spawning too many threads, but then doesn't fix itself so the user is left to figure out for himself that he needs to reboot it with a paper clip (more often the user will be likely to just smash the damn thing and bring it to IT folks in pieces.) In the simulator, the networking stack can throw uncaught exceptions. The Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is needed to push data to the handheld, crashes regularly.

    I do dearly miss the previous generation of Blackberry with Mobitex network access. Not only does Mobitex have vastly better coverage that even works in airplanes, but that version of the handheld had a proper C API and berry-to-berry networking capabilities.