KEY POINTS:
It's been an involuntary ritual I've performed countless times in the last couple of weeks - my eye settles on the polished black of Telecom's BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, looking for that red pulsing light that indicates a new email message has arrived.
The BlackBerry is like a bookish travel companion, always ready to divulge some new insight. When using it, the concept of logging-on to check email goes out the window. The device, from Canadian firm Research in Motion, functions primarily as it did back in 2004 when I trialled one of the first BlackBerrys to be offered by Vodafone.
The whole experience centres around push-email technology which uses GPRS mobile data to dribble copies of email from a server to your phone as it arrives at the server.
While a dream at managing email - you are simply given the plain text and the option to open documents, so as to save on data traffic charges, numerous other devices have caught up with the Blackberry when it comes to push email - see Windows Mobile 6 for example.
But the BlackBerry has been evolving too, particularly its user-interface and the breadth of applications available on it has proliferated. It now features a multimedia player, in-built GPS, a microSD card slot, personal information management applications and Bluetooth 2.0.
Before, you may have carried the Blackberry in conjunction with a better-featured mobile or music player. Now the BlackBerry can competently handle most functions you'll need on the road, though there's no digital camera included. I wasn't able to use Google Talk on the 8830 despite there being an icon on the desktop for it, but I'm told it should work with this model. Yahoo Messenger also comes as a default application.
The classic side scroll wheel that's given many an executive the ache of BlackBerry thumb is gone, replaced by an illuminated scroll wheel in the BlackBerry's centre about the full QWERTY keyboard.
The World Edition is thinner but wider than the classic BlackBerry Pearl and has a sleek black face plate with silver trim. My travel companions laughed at how wide it is, but I sure appreciated the full-sized screen which allows for lighting-fast typing once you know the keyboard's layout and gives a nice widescreen feel to the full-colour screen.
Telecom is aiming the BlackBerry squarely at executives who travel regularly and previously would have had to borrow a GSM phone for travel to Europe.
It means that with one device, one phone number and voicemail box you can roam to pretty much anywhere in the world for voice and pick up email in over 60 countries. I used the BlackBerry 8830 in Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Munich, Amsterdam, Barcelona and London.
Voice calling, mobile data and web browsing were available in all of those countries, with varying quality levels based on the operators I was connecting to.
In many cases - Germany and Spain, I found I had to selection a network to connect to manually, while in Britain and Hong Kong, the BlackBerry automatically connected me to a network and had cleared my email a few seconds after I'd booted it up. Ironically, I spent most of my time roaming on Vodafone, but voice calling and data performance was similar across Vodafone, Orange, Movistar and O2.
It doesn't take long to see the benefits of using a device like this - I barely opened my laptop to check email on this trip, didn't need to search out Wi-fi spots. While I wouldn't recommend typing long emails on the BlackBerry I happily wrote a couple of blog posts on the device able to quickly dive between the notepad and the web browser to copy and paste web addresses into the article. Not all web pages format for the BlackBerry, but I was able to get by.
The calendar and address book features are intuitive and tightly integrated so a new contact can easily be created from an incoming number and you can place calls or SMS messages from a phone number embedded in an email or text message. Those types of features come in handy when you're hurrying through an airport between flights.
The BlackBerry also functioned for me as a useful music player. I just loaded up a microSD card with mp3 files (it also supports AAC/AAC+/eAAC+ and WMA files), though you'll need a non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack, which luckily I did have. When it comes to video, the BlackBerry's media player supports MP4 and WMV playback and video looks reasonably good on the QVGA (320 x 240), though isn't a patch on the iPhone which I also had with me.
I made some use of the Wayfinder GPS mapping programme to help find my way around Barcelona and it functioned well, though I prefer the GPS, interface and mapping of Nokia's N95. The BlackBerry usually served up 3.5 days of life off a single charge with solid data usage and the occasional phone call, game of Brick Breaker and a bit of music playing. In standby mode with the screen dimmed, the phone uses little power and comes to life quickly when you first turn it on.
While the convenience the BlackBerry afforded me to keep in touch with people on the other side of the world was great, how much does doing so cost?
Well, Telecom standardised its mobile voice and data roaming rates last year and details are listed here. In short, voice calls aren't cheap and neither is heavy data usage. But the BlackBerry generally receives data in chunks of less than 10 kilobit. If you open a 400kb PDF on the BlackBerry you can expect to pay dearly for the luxury.
Sticking to the low-level emailing, texting and the occasional mobile call is likely to keep you costs under control. In fact, I found having the push email constantly at my fingertips meant I made less phone calls and could be productive in the downtime I had on the trip, especially given the opposite time zones.
Good: Excellent push-email, versatile PIM, nice design and plenty of scope for adding applications
Bad: No camera, non-standard headphone jack, voice-dialling button easy to accidentally bump.
www.telecom.co.nz/roaming
