The Blackberry 8700c is distinct for a couple of reasons. It's the first Blackberry powered by an Intel processor--a 312MHz PXA901 processor, to be exact--and it's also the first EDGE-enabled Blackberry. With this combination, you should enjoy faster web browsing and download times, as well as quicker overall performance, which, on the whole, we found to be true (see Performance).

Of course, Blackberry's are known for their e-mail prowess, and the Blackberry 8700c doesn't disappoint. With the help of your IT department, the smart phone can sync with your company's Blackberry, Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise server to deliver corporate e-mail in real time. The Blackberry 8700c also supports up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts; we set up our device to receive messages from our POP3 account, and after about 20 minutes of tinkering, we started getting our e-mail, with the smart phone checking for new messages every 15 minutes. The 8700c also features enhancements to attachment viewing. You now can view Excel documents as spreadsheets rather than in plain text, and you have more image-editing options at your disposal. You can rotate, as well as zoom in and out, and once you've zoomed in, you can use the Enhance function to recalibrate the image to reduce pixilation. Throughout our test period, we received and opened various documents without any problems. The Blackberry 8700c also supports text and multimedia messaging, as well as instant messaging. However, the latter is limited to a Blackberry Messenger, so you can communicate only with those who use that proprietary client.

RIM throws in other useful applications for the mobile professional. There's a calendar, a task list, a memo pad, and a calculator. A couple of demo apps that we enjoyed and may be worth the download were Quote stream Wireless and AskMeNow. Quote stream allows you to receive wireless-streaming stock quotes right on your 8700c, while AskMeNow gives you quick access to weather, sports scores, flight information, and more. It also has an Ask Jeeves-type functionality called Ask Anything, where you can input a question, and you'll receive the answer in your in-box. We asked a sports-related question, "Where did Peyton Manning go to school?" and lo and behold, within five minutes, we had our answer along with some other useful information--pretty neat! One final noteworthy addition is the ability to toggle between applications. By holding down Alt, then pressing the Esc key, you can quickly access your messages, your home screen, your phone, your messenger, your web browser, or your WorkSpace CRM, rather than tediously backing out of several layers of apps.