Going straight into its specifications, the Blackberry 8800 comes equipped with a QWERTY keyboard – unlike Blackberry Pearl – and a trackball navigation system. It appears that Blackberry had finally come into terms with the fact that joysticks are not great devices for navigational purposes, especially to zip through a phone menu. The QWERTY keyboard can be a bit confusing in the beginning, but as the user starts typing on it, gradually he/she will get used to it.

If there is another major difference between Blackberry 8800 and the Pearl, then it is the absence of the camera. Blackberry has dispensed with the camera in 8800 for a more reliable feature, the GPS, to track down roaming business users and devices. Even though, the Blackberry 8800 does not have Google Maps in it, the bundled TeleNav GPS Navigator does an exceptional job in giving the user the right directions always. The local search function also works very well.

The display of 8800 is quite bright (320 x 240 resolution) and offers good visibility in all lighting conditions. A built-in light sensing device adjusts the brightness levels of the keypad and screen accordingly to optimize visibility.

Blackberry 8800 supports EDGE and quad-band GSM/GPRS networks with reasonable data speed. For moderate to extensive browsing needs, the handset performs reasonably well. Regarding email, if using the Blackberry web services, the phone supports as much as ten corporate and personal e-mail accounts, the setup being one of the easiest one could find in any of the smart phones on earth. Attachment support is excellent – users can view Word, PDF, Excel, and JPEG files – even though there are no way you could edit the office documents. Using the Desktop Manager, the Blackberry user could synchronize the memos, calendar, tasks, and contacts with the relevant organizer tools such that every relevant piece of info will be updated in the required applications simultaneously.

Like all other phones in its category, the Blackberry 8800 also offers an assortment of multimedia features that include music and video, ring tones, and images. The Media Manager utility can be used to import photos, and videos into the device, even though, as mentioned already, one may not be able to take pictures or record videos using 8800 as it lacks a camera. The media player supports the file types – MP3, AAC, and WMA music files, as well as WMV video and MPEG-4 files. DRM support however is absent.

Other voice features include voice-cancellation for better audio performance, VAD – Voice Activated Dialing – with Speaker Independent Voice Recognition, call forwarding, conference calls, and smart dialing, a high quality low-distortion speakerphone, and dedicated ‘mute’, ‘send’, and ‘end’ keys.

Finally, the pricing, the Blackberry 8800 carries a price tag – £299 – that falls in between Blackberry Pearl and the Cingular 8525 (£399). Given its features, however, this is a quite reasonable price (Its competitors also carries a similar price tag).

You know the type; you’re busy minding your own business but they’ll sit next to you and force you to endure a daily demonstration of the latest app that they’ve downloaded.   They do this with such a self assured smugness that you’d swear that they’d invented the iPhone, not had it handed to them by their mobile phone provider.

I am starting to get a little envious however…..

It seems there are more to these apps than initially meet the eye; after years of dominance, both the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS portable games consoles are starting to lose ground to, bizarrely enough, a phone.

After just a few years in the industry, the Apple iPhone boasts over 21,000 game apps compared to the Nintendo DS which has over 3,500 titles or the Sony PSP which has just over 600.  In defense of the Sony PSP, the majority of those 600 titles are large games created by recognized software houses whereas the majority of the 21,000 iPhone games are ‘bite-sized’ two quid offerings.

Personally I have always been of the disposition that if you are going to play a game on a mobile device then you probably want it bite sized anyway as you’re unlikely to get enough uninterrupted time to get immersed in a monster sized game.  That having been said, with the latest iPhone boasting a faster processor and third generation Operating System there are already some fairly staggering games coming to market and some serious money is being pumped in to future game development.

The method of game distribution is also one of the primary advantages the iPhone has over the competition.  The Sony PSP for example uses mini optical discs that not only do users have to carry around with them but additionally distributors have to worry about the costs involved in producing and distributing the software to the gamer.  The iPhone by comparison stores games in the internal memory of the phone and users simply download games directly from the Apple website rather than buying them in a more cumbersome physical format.

It will be interesting to see how the turning fortunes of Sony and Nintendo will affect any planned successors to the DS or PSP and it is becoming apparent that dedicated portable gaming systems may have their days numbered.  Unfortunately for Nintendo this is a market that they have relied on heavily since they released the GameBoy back in 1989 and they are ill positioned to launch a competing product to the iPhone.  Sony Ericsson however remains a formidable force in the mobile phone market it can surely only be a matter of time before they retaliate with their own hybrid device.