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If you think BlackBerry devices are all blue and square-ish, you are in for a surprise. Eager to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and aware that the size and shape of traditional BlackBerry devices doesn't appeal to everyone, Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry, has come up with a more phone-like look for its hardware.
The 7100v does what you'd expect a BlackBerry device to do. It acts primarily as a remote e-mail machine. If you are in a corporate situation, your IT department can set things up so that your server pumps e-mail out to you. If you don't have such facilities, you can use the Web Client service.
This checks up to ten different e-mail accounts, collects any mail that is sitting around waiting to be collected, and forwards a copy to the 7100v. The mail is left on your server so that you can collect it again at your main PC later, but you can also deal with it on the move.
The 7100v can handle attachments in the form of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Acrobat documents. Both screen size limitations and the fact that text is extracted from layout mean there are some limitations.
None of this is unique to the 7100v, but what is unique to the 7100 series of devices is a rearranged keyboard. The keyboard is smaller than on standard BlackBerry devices, and has fewer keys: they are arranged in a grid five keys wide and four keys tall. In most cases there are two letters on each key, while the numberpad for voice dialling is also on the centre block of keys.
The 7100v incorporates a technology that RIM calls SureType, designed to speed up data entry. It has a built in dictionary and it will learn new words. After a while this makes data entry fairly fast, but early on we found it very difficult to get used to. The RIM people tell us their research suggests that those coming to the 7100v from text entry on a mobile phone rather than text entry on a QWERTY keyboard tend to find the transition easier.
Apart from its ability to deal with e-mail, the 7100v has the usual calendar and contacts applications and can synchronise data with your main computer.
