The blackberry Curve 8300 - 83xx - Pretty cool.

I recently came across a free Blackberry Curve 8300 for ATT - a friend of a friend was getting an iPhone 3G (after she had become enamored with the iPod touch) and was just going to give it to him, fortunately for me he has Verizon not ATT or T-Mobile, and I said I'd offer him some money for it. He said "nonsense (nice!), I'll ask her if I can give it to you." So she said yes.

The software that came with it was old, like it had never been updated. I later found out why. The synching/software interface for the blackberry is atrocious. I later found out too that you can do MOST things without synching. Such as over-the-airwaves App installs and stuff. Not to mention...Synching the blackberry to the computer is extremely slow. It took like 35 minutes just to do the software upgrade. The iPhone definitely has it beat in that arena.

Anway, I'm a happy, Loyal, iPhone user (only because its unix in my pocket, and jailbroken..so I can do the things I need to do with MY computer - hopefully all of this carrier-lock in junk will be over soon.), but I was impressed with this little device, despite its stubbornness in wanting to charge. It seems to have some issues...I bought a car charger for my girlfriend for this device, and it seemed to charge straight away. When I hooked it up to the computer (much like I had found trying to synch it at work) - It was a mess of steps to get the thing recognized and charging.  Why can't I just plug the USB cable in and let it charge the battery. ARGH.

Anyway, hopefully I can work on her Vista machine some more (i did the synching and initial software upgrade on an XP machine) and get it to recognize the device so she can charge it there, since my friend forgot to bring me the wall charger.

Overall, I like the device. They're relatively inexpensive, though the data plan is more expensive than an iphone at 30$/month (35$/month if you want at least 200 txt messages...some are a requirement otherwise you're getting shafted at the .20/.30 cent per message mark. Lame.

Its not an iPhone, but its not half bad either, and it has a large community support base as well. Once I got past a few of the quirks, everything seems to be OK and she seemed to pick it up pretty intuitively.