The BlackBerry 8120 is very similar to its predecessor, the 8100, and overall it's not a very different phone -- but there are a few differences worth mentioning.
The most significant addition to the BlackBerry 8120 is Wi-Fi, which allows you to quickly access your emails and the Internet via Wi-Fi hotspots. We tested it out and it works well. It's particularly useful if you're indoors and can't get a good GSM signal, although we would have liked to have seen 3G too.
The next most noticeable update is the camera which has now been bumped up to 2-megapixels instead of 1.3, and can now shoot video. Although we'd like to say there's a massive difference, it's really not that superior and the video quality is okay on a small screen but don't expect to shoot a short film on it.
Interestingly the two improvements that pleased us most weren't exactly headliners, but they do make a difference to the overall user experience, and they are the 3.5mm headphone jack and external microSD slot.
Adding a 3.5mm jack means that you can plug in your favourite pair of headphones straight into the 8120, and the external microSD slot means you can swap memory card without needing to take the back cover off and remove the battery.
Overall, we still think this is a great email phone and recommend it to people who want to straddle the consumer/business line, but we'd really like to see 3G, or even HSDPA (3.5G) on the next iteration and some more on-board memory.
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dpr20 1 April 2008
Good: Trackball, QWERTY keyboard
Bad: No POP3 or IMAP e-mail
Comment: I was given this phone as a free upgrade from Orange and after careful consideration I decided not to keep it. The major (and totally unexpected) problem for me was the absence of a POP3/IMAP email client. When I selected this phone (supposedly for its email capabilities) I didn't realise that I would no other choice but to pay an additional £10-£14 per month to access my email via Blackberry's push service. With my previous (Windows mobile) phone, I just checked my email using IMAP, which worked well (albeit a little slowly) and didn't cost anything like this amount in data charges.
This problem aside, on the whole I found this phone to be well designed. The QWERTY keyboard worked quite well once I got used to it and the trackball was also very easy to use. I did find Blackberry's bespoke OS rather clunky though, and limited compared to Windows mobile. I also thought the phone was rather flimsily constructed.
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