BlackBerry 7130c

New Cingular Blackberry 7130c
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BlackBerry 7130c Review:

The BlackBerry 7130c brings high-speed EDGE networking to this popular line of e-mail devices. That makes for an irony: This handheld shines most brightly when tethered to a PC.

The year-old BlackBerry 7100 series line delivers push e-mail in a more phone-like shape. It does so by using a hybrid keyboard where two letters share most keys. An advanced predictive-text system learns your vocabulary—by absorbing the contents of your address book, calendar, and the words you type in e-mails which means that eventually, you double-tap less. Testing it out for a few minutes isn't enough to give you a real feel for it, because it takes a while for the BlackBerry to learn your vocabulary.

At 4.6 by 2.2 by 0.9 inches (HWD) and 4.6 ounces, the 7130c is a little thicker, chunkier, and heavier than the 7100g, but holding it is still relatively comfortable. Like its predecessors, the 7130c has a bright, sharp 240-by-260 color screen, and it can hook up to corporate BlackBerry servers, Microsoft Exchange, and Lotus Notes e-mail (via a desktop redirector program). Individuals will probably use Verizon's Web client, which integrates up to ten POP3, IMAP, AOL, or Hotmail e-mail accounts. The included desktop software syncs contacts, calendars, notes, and tasks with a wide range of desktop apps quickly and easily.

The 7130c's real innovation is using the EDGE network, which gives download speeds up to three times as fast as the GPRS network or the 1xRTT network used by previous BlackBerrys. We hooked our BlackBerry up to a PC to use as a modem with the included mini USB cable. It produced impressive download speeds that ranged from 60 Kbps to 75 Kbps, on a par with a dedicated PC Card modem.

Since the BlackBerry e-mail system is optimized for slower networks, the fast EDGE network doesn't shine quite as brightly when you're using the BlackBerry as a handheld. The system just doesn't transmit enough data for EDGE speed to become important. E-mails arrived at the same speed as on a T-Mobile BlackBerry 7105g, which uses the much slower GPRS network. As the BlackBerry Internet Service boils most attachments down to formatted text, we didn't see much of an advantage there, either, though scrolling down through attachments was noticeably snappier on the 7130c than on the 7100g.

Web browsing was definitely faster with EDGE but not by the tenfold difference we'd expect from sheer throughput speeds; pages like www.expedia.com downloaded and displayed two to three times as quickly on the BlackBerry 7130c as on the 7100g.

As a phone, the 7130c delivers loud and clear sound from its earpiece. The microphone successfully masked construction noise when we made a call from a busy outdoor area. The speakerphone is spectacular and loud enough for indoor and outdoor use. We paired the BlackBerry 7130c successfully with Bluetooth headsets; the limited Bluetooth 2.0 implementation allows for headsets and syncing with desktop computers, but not dial-up networking or file transfer. As is typical with BlackBerrys, there's no voice dialing. Talk time is just less than 4 hours, which isn't bad for a phone. In comparison, the PalmOne Treo 650 offers 4.5 hours of talk time.