Should I buy it?
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User reviews1
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.