RIM BlackBerry 7750 (Verizon Wireless) review: RIM BlackBerry 7750 (Verizon Wireless)

Intro
While PalmOne gets all the attention with its line of Treo smart phones, it's easy to overlook the simple yet highly functional BlackBerry line of smart phones from Research in Motion (RIM). Whereas the Treo 650 represents the marriage of a business-oriented smart phone to a multimedia-enabled handheld, the BlackBerry 7750 stands as the poster child for utilitarian simplicity. And that is exactly why we love it. Having experienced a few missteps with its first attempts at the wireless e-mail device/PDA/cell phone, RIM has learned a few things, listened to users, and with the BlackBerry 7750, offered by Verizon, Sprint PCS and EarthLink, consumers get a nice little package. The first thing you'll notice about the RIM BlackBerry 7750 is its size. At 4.7 by 3.0 by 0.7 inches and 5 ounces, it's much larger than older BlackBerry devices such as the 7280 or the newer 7100t. Because of its size, carrying it around in your pants pocket is uncomfortable. Furthermore, some people won't want to walk around holding up a PDA to the side of their face. We suspect that most users will opt to use the 7750 with the included swivel holster and the earbud-style headset.

Of course, this extra size isn't for naught. The 7750 sports an enormous 3-inch-diagonal display that supports 65,536 colors. In BlackBerry-speak, that translates into a display that shows four rows of icons instead of three. And while we appreciate the size of the display, which makes it easy to read e-mail and surf the wireless Web, the screen wasn't very bright. Even with its backlight set on high, the display doesn't necessarily pop as much as the 7100t's does.

Similar to more traditional BlackBerry devices, the 7750 provides a mini-QWERTY keyboard that is actually easy to use. Firing off e-mail messages, navigating to Web pages, and entering alphanumeric data is easy to do with your thumbs. Typing special characters require first pushing the SYM key, which accesses a screen with the necessary options. This, however, is merely a learning-curve issue that users will quickly overcome.

Dialing a number can be done in one of two ways. Using the scrollwheel on the handset's right side, you can highlight, then activate the Phone icon. This brings you to the Phone interface, in which the left-hand side of the keyboard behaves like a more traditional number pad. Type in the number you wish to call, then hit the Return key. If that involves more fumbling around than you'd like, hitting the Phone-mode quick-launch button above the scrollwheel automatically takes you to the Phone interface.

In addition to the aforementioned scrollwheel and Phone-Mode shortcut key, you'll also find a Back button (which you press to end a call) on the right side of the handset. On the bottom of the unit, you'll find the IR port and a port for a USB cable/charger. The 2.5mm jack for the headset resides on device's top.

The RIM BlackBerry 7750's phone book can hold more than a thousand entries, but actual size is dependent on the available memory. Other features include text messaging, a calendar, a calculator, a task list, USB support, a memo pad, an alarm clock, a game (Jawbreaker), three-way calling, a vibrate mode, and 20 polyphonic ring tones.

Mobile access to your POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail is handled in a number of ways. If your company has BlackBerry Enterprise Server installed on its servers, your IT team can help you get started. If, like ours, your company doesn't, you can use the BlackBerry Web Client to have e-mail messages wirelessly forwarded to your 7750; alternately, and even more conveniently, you can use the included e-mail redirector to push e-mail from Microsoft Outlook directly to the device. You can open and view--but not edit--e-mail attachments.

The BlackBerry 7750 uses Microsoft's ActiveSync application to transfer PIM data between the device and your desktop. We had no problems synchronizing our contact and calendar information onto the 7750 with ActiveSync. Of course, BlackBerry's PIM applications aren't as elegant as the systems on PalmOne and Pocket PC devices. But as we mentioned earlier, BlackBerry devices are less about showing off than about getting the job done. If you choose Compose to create a new e-mail message from the home screen, the 7750 tries to autocomplete the To field based on the information in your address book. When you have multiple e-mail addresses for one contact, a dialog box pops up prompting you to choose the appropriate address.

The handset ships with a fairly standard WAP 2.0 wireless browser, which we used to check Web-based e-mail services such as Yahoo and MSN. While the browser was not necessarily pretty, we were able to check those accounts easily. To our disappointment, unlike the BlackBerry 7100t, the 7750 doesn't ship with any instant-messaging software. Of course, you can purchase versions of AIM and Yahoo Messenger from Handango for around $20.

Though it lacks an SD card expansion slot, the mobile boasts 14MB of internal flash memory and 2MB of SRAM. While this may not seem like much, remember that the 7750 isn't necessarily a multimedia device, so running out of memory shouldn't be an issue. On the downside, the 7750 lacks Bluetooth and a speakerphone. They would have been fantastic additions.

We tested the dual-band RIM BlackBerry 7750 (CDMA 800/1900) on Verizon's network in the San Francisco Bay Area. The smart phone worked like a charm. We never lost a signal, whether here in downtown San Francisco, riding the bus across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, or in more residential areas in the East Bay. As with other BlackBerry phones, we often lost the speaker's sweet spot on our ear and had to move the headset around to hear conversations. In addition, callers could tell that we were using a cell phone. Using the 7750's included earbud-style headset changed the experience dramatically. Not only was it easier to hear speakers, callers reported that they could hear us better, too.

The 7750's battery life was excellent. We managed 4 hours of talk time on a single charge, beating the rated time of 3.3 hours. For standby time, we met the promised time of eight days. According to the FCC, the 7750 has a digital SAR rating of 1.27 watts per kilogram.