The BlackBerry 8820 is designed for heavy duty business working complete with (increasingly essential) WiFi 802.11 capability. At 114 x 66 x 14 mm and weighing 136g the device makes no claims for slimness and discretion but sports an excellent 2.4-inch display full QWERTY keyboard and trackerball navigation. The Wi-Fi 802.11 connection kicks in where cell tower reception is weak or unavailable - a back up to EDGE in effect. First it scans available networks then you choose which one you would like to connect to - it also tells you what if any encryption is enabled for that network. You can save the network profile to a list for future connections which can re-prioritised at any time should there be a choice of networks available. Internet browsing is acceptable over the Wi-Fi connection - being close to an accessible access point is actually far better than a laggardly Internet connection over EDGE. As with the Blackberry Curve range the 8820 ships with a media player that synchronizes with supplied software from Roxio making it easy to drag and drop music photos and videos on to the device. Among the mandatory array of applications including hands-free and Java the document viewer supports Microsoft Word Excel and PowerPoint Corel WordPerfect and Adobe PDF documents. The 8820 also offers GPS navigation as a pay-for extra - turn-by-turn directions if you purchase the TeleNav GPS Navigator software). Battery life is rated at up to five hours active talk time and up to 520 hours on standby. - Full QWERTY keyboard - 802.11 Wifi connectivity - 2.4-inch display - GPS navigation available - Wide range of business applications |
