THE ULTIMATE BUSINESS TOOL FOR smartphone lovers, the BlackBerry 8830 lets you stay connected, any time, anywhere, in comfort and style. Combine this with legendary BlackBerry email prowess and you can easily see why the 8830 is worthy of our Editors' Choice award. The 8830 looks very much like BlackBerry 8800, just in a dull gray instead of the 8800's more stylish black. That means it's a wide, fiat device, with sculpted keys that aren't quite as comfortable as the widely separated keys on older BlackBerrys, but still definitely good enough to use. Just like the 8800, the 8830 has a beautiful, sharp 320 by 240 pixel screen that adapts admirably to ambient light, thanks to its built-in ambient light sensor.

Whether you're roaming or not, calls sound terrific on this phone. Volume from both the earpiece and speakerphone is loud too, and voices sound deep and clear, without distortion. I connected both PlantroniCs Voyager 510 and Pulsar 590 Bluetooth headsets to the phone, and you can use a wired headset through the standard, 2.5-mm headset jack. Voice dialing is easy with the built-in VoiceSignal suite, and talk time is excellent, over five and a half hours. The 8830 is also first multimedia BlackBerry, and I'in glad to say multimedia plays very well on the handset. RIM's new PC desktop software for both XP and Vista uses elements of Roxio's Media Creator 9 suite to organize and automatically convert photos, music and video files for the device. The one-click video conversion is a big step forward, and videos look great at 24 frames per second, in full screen on the 8830. You can also play unprotected MP3, WMA and AAC music and create and transfer playlists from within the desktop software.

Unfortunately, the phone doesn't support Bluetooth stereo audio, though it does accept 4 GB microSD cards (in my case I used a Sandisk card.) Two data modems are also built in - and yes, it can be used as a modem for your PC. The EVDO modem, usable in the US and Canada, gave me speeds of approx. 600 kbps down and 30-50 kbps up. The much slower GPRS modem kicks in when you're overseas - expect speeds of only 20-40 kbps from that one, but it's mostly for receiving e-mail onto the handheld itself. Like all BlackBerrys, the 8830 just works. I can't overemphasize that enough. You don't have to tweak it, it doesn't crash, it just operates as advertised. Of course, the platform could use a wider software selection, especially affordable Microsoft Office document editors. Still, the 8830 is the easiest, smoothest, sleekest way to get your work done.


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