The Blackberry 8820

The new Blackberry is coming to AT&T and will have both Wifi and GPS. Unfortunately it won’t have 3G or a camera. A few things of interest here:

1. AT&T seems to have a major advantage with device selection. I imagine this will draw many customers from other carriers despite their dislike of the company in the past.
2. Blackberry still doesn’t have 3G. I think this is because of the battery life issue; the 3G radios are known to be quite thirsty, and RIM is famous for providing their customers with excellent battery life. I don’t think they think the tradeoff is worth it, and I agree with them.
3. It sucks they couldn’t have kept the camera. It’s nice to gain the GPS and Wifi, but it’s unfortunate that we had to lose something that is on the Curve to get those features.

It seems the N95 from Nokia is the only device doing pretty much everything, but it doesn’t call to me near as much as a Blackberry or iPhone does. To me it’s more about how you do the things you do than anything else.

Obviously I’d like both — iPhone’s execution with the N95′s features — but we’ll have to wait for that. Eventually someone will get it right. It’s an exciting time to be watching the mobile device market. I like the fact that all the various manufacturers are being prodded to excel by increased competition. It only helps us as consumers.