BlackBerry 8820 Cell Phone Review - Messaging
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Mark Brezinski Published on October 11, 2007 Comment on this |
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Supported E-mail Services (8.0)
Push E-mail (4.0)
Push e-mail means your BlackBerry will download your e-mail as soon as it hits your inbox. This service is available through two venues: the BlackBerry Internet Server or the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The former is run by your ISP and the latter is run by a company. Push e-mail is one of the aspects that sets BlackBerry devices above the competition in regards to messaging.
Multiple E-mail Accounts (10.0)
The 8820 can support quite a few POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts. You can have at least 10, which should be enough for virtually all users. E-mail addresses can be input via the device, synchronized from a PC via the desktop software, or created online via the network's Web-based controls. The 8820 is incredibly flexible with e-mail, making management easy.
HTML and Attachments (2.0)
The e-mail client built into the 8800 does not support HTML. As for attachments, we were able to view our test Word, Excel, PDF, Powerpoint and Zip files.
E-mail Customizations (2.0)
The BlackBerry 8820 does not provide you with many customization options when creating e-mails. You cannot change font color or the height of displayed e-mails. You cannot change font type and size within the program; however, you can change both globally in the phone settings. You can create signatures for outgoing e-mails, however.
Time to a New Message (20.41)
Creating new messageson the 8820 is incredibly easy to do. Since the cursor remembers what you last clicked on, for our timing tests we always reset it to the top left item, which just happens to be the messaging icon. From here, all that was necessary were a few clicks of the trackball. We were able to reach the new e-mail entry in slightly less than a second (0.98 seconds to be exact), which is quite fast.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| BlackBerry 8820 | 0.98 | 20.41 |
| Nokia E90 | 3.43 | 5.83 |
| Nokia N95 | 4.40 | 4.55 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 7.46 | 2.68 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 2.23 | 8.97 |
| Apple iPhone | 1.90 | 10.53 |
E-mail Usability (11.0)
E-mail on the 8820 is identical to e-mail on any other BlackBerry. Each e-mail account gets its own inbox icon on the Main menu. Once you open a new e-mail dialogue, clicking the trackball brings up an abbreviated menu, while the menu button opens a more detailed version. If you have an inbox bursting with e-mail and the trackball just isn't scrolling fast enough, the space bar acts as a page down button. Keep in mind that holding shift while moving the trackball highlights items, so don't spend hours deleting an inbox by dancing between the delete and enter keys.
Supported IM Services (1.0)
The 8820 only supports BlackBerry's proprietary messenger, which can only sent IMs to other BlackBerry owners, but is free. Other IM clients can be downloaded and installed, provided they have BlackBerry compatible versions.
MMS Support (1.0)
One aspect of the 880 that, unfortunately, hasn't been changed is the MMS capability. It does support MMS messaging, and keeps the same inbox for MMS and SMS. Beyond that, however, MMS doesn't receive much attention. We weren't able to MMS messages from the photo album, and we couldn't browse outside the preloaded images folder on the phone. Granted, the phone doesn't have a camera, but the MMS could have been cleaned up a bit from the old model.
SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
The 8820 doesn't recognize smiley faces.
SMS/MMS Ease of Use (6.0)
Regardless of how poorly the 8820 handles MMS, making text messages is simple. The inbox for SMS/MMS is handled exactly like the e-mail inboxes. The trackball still opens up a short menu while the menu button takes you to the full thing. The layout is straightforward and easy to use. We really like how BlackBerry manages messaging.
Time to a New SMS Message (4.98)
To time how long it takes to create a new SMS message, we begin a timer when the phone is in an unlocked standby and stop it as soon as we get a new SMS dialogue to pop up. The 8820 was able to perform this test in 2.01 seconds, which is, again, very fast. It's actually quite similar to creating an e-mail, it just requires a bit more menu navigation once inside the messaging application.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| BlackBerry 8820 | 2.01 | 4.98 |
| Nokia E90 | 1.99 | 5.03 |
| Nokia N95 | 0.90 | 11.11 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 7.10 | 1.41 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 2.36 | 4.24 |
| Apple iPhone | 2.62 | 3.82 |
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