If you think BlackBerry devices are all blue and square-ish, you are in for a surprise. Eager to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and aware that the size and shape of traditional BlackBerry devices doesn't appeal to everyone, Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry, has come up with a more phone-like look for its hardware.

The new 7100 series of devices is available in several different slightly tweaked models - there were five at the last count - each identified by a letter following the model number. The 7100v was the first to appear in the UK (from Vodafone), while the 7100x is now also available (from O2). Here we're looking at the 7100v.

The 7100v does what you'd expect a BlackBerry device to do. It acts primarily as a remote e-mail machine. If you are in a corporate situation, your IT department can set things up so that your server pumps e-mail out to you. If you don't have such facilities, you can use the Web Client service.

This checks up to ten different e-mail accounts, collects any mail that is sitting around waiting to be collected, and forwards a copy to the 7100v. The mail is left on your server so that you can collect it again at your main PC later, but you can also deal with it on the move.

The 7100v can handle attachments in the form of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Acrobat documents. Both screen size limitations and the fact that text is extracted from layout mean there are some limitations.

None of this is unique to the 7100v, but what is unique to the 7100 series of devices is a rearranged keyboard. The keyboard is smaller than on standard BlackBerry devices, and has fewer keys: they are arranged in a grid five keys wide and four keys tall. In most cases there are two letters on each key, while the numberpad for voice dialling is also on the centre block of keys.

The 7100v incorporates a technology that RIM calls SureType, designed to speed up data entry. It has a built in dictionary and it will learn new words. After a while this makes data entry fairly fast, but early on we found it very difficult to get used to. The RIM people tell us their research suggests that those coming to the 7100v from text entry on a mobile phone rather than text entry on a QWERTY keyboard tend to find the transition easier.

Apart from its ability to deal with e-mail, the 7100v has the usual calendar and contacts applications and can synchronise data with your main computer, though its PDA-style functions are not as sophisticated as those on other devices we could mention, and there are no expansion slots for augmenting the built-in 32MB of memory.

Verdict
The BlackBerry concept is great if you need access to e-mail all the time and don't need sophisticated handheld computing features. SureType was not that successful for us, but this reviewer comes from a keyboard-using background rather than a phone-using one. The size and shape of this BlackBerry will be preferable for many people than the squarer, older style.

Company: Research in Motion

Contact: 01784 477465

Tags: blackberry research in motion suretype vodafone blackberry playbook rim qwerty mobile phone