I am not a BlackBerry user but had read nothing but good things about their latest phone, called the Bold.  It is being talked about as the RIM answer to the I-phone.  It is certainly a much nicer looking device than any of their previous offerings.  It sits nicely in the hand and the keyboard works well, the display is very clear.  I couldn’t believe the quality of the little sample video clips that cam with the phone.

If, like me, you haven’t used one before, it is a big change in the way the phone is set up and doubtless that will take some getting used to.  Importantly, the call quality seems good and the RF signal is better than the Nokia e71 I tried last week.

I don’t need ‘push’ email (which gave rise to the Crackberry name), but I do need to be able to ‘pull’ my mail when I need to.  For those of you who don’t need every email on your phone the second it arrives, this is a great option.  You stay in control and you don’t need to subscribe to the extra cost of push email. 

The device they sent me was not right so it is being replaced tomorrow, so these are just very early impressions; I’ll let you know more once I have given it a more serious road-test.  One thing I’m not sure about is the voice dialling is a computerised system rather than relying on you to record the tags, which means that whilst one one hand it is effortless to set up, it obviously less accurate for the 15 or so numbers I use all the time in the car.