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The Blackberry 8800 made it's UK debut a few weeks ago. At that time my company was in the middle of a negotiation for a large number of Blackberry 8700's, and as Vodafone had these devices straight after they were launched we managed to talk them into upgrading our order to a batch of free 8800's instead.

Blackberry 8800 and 8700

When I first installed it, BES 4.1 had initially annoyed me with it's move away from the classic MMC and redesigned interface (why did they disable right-clicks?) but using it to do a bulk device rollout was noticibly less administrative effort than on older BES versions. It was basically done in these steps:

• Bulk add the users from the GAL
• Create a new group (Blackberry group, not AD group)
• In the BES console add all of these users to the group

You can then apply changes to these users all at the same time by applying them to the group - such as:

• Setting activation password
• Applying IT Policy

I created a simple IT policy for these users to show user information on the 'device locked' screen and to lock the devices after 60 minutes of idle time. They were also required to set a password with a minimum of 4 digits on activation.

Final step was then to:

• Activate the devices

Instead of activating these devices myself, I wrote a quick guide to help them through the setup wizard and to let them know the activation password, and I sent it with the PDF version of the 8800 "Getting Started Guide". The only activation problems I had were a few devices that were not provisioned properly by Vodafone so would not activate - this meant a few calls to customer support (but I guess 5 out of 42 devices isn't that bad).

The devices themselves are pretty good, basically I would describe it as like a big Pearl with a few extra gimmicks thrown in - such as GPS and Blackberry Maps (which is a bit slow and US-centric). Size-wise they are actually a bit bigger than the 8700 but slightly slimmer, and the thumb board has been redesigned - the keys are now closer together and feel a bit more spongy rather than clicky. The screen is still good - nice and bright and fonts are easy to read. Overall though I think I do prefer my 8700 BB. It just feels the right size and I'm used to the spacing on the thumb board.

The biggest change on the 8800 is the move away from the jog wheel to the pearl-style trackball. It does work quite well but I do feel a little disappointed, the BB jog wheel is just iconic, and in some ways I think it's more precise - you definitely know when you have 'clicked' it from one position to the next. Anyway my users are happy with their brand new toys and happy users means less support calls!

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