Blackberry 8830 Review
Its full name is the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, and that last part is especially important because it distinguishes this phone from its predecessor, the BlackBerry 8800 in, among other ways, the awesome fact that it operates on both the GSM and CDMA wireless cellular networks. What does this mean in plain English?
Glad you asked! What it means is that people in the United States can now use Verizon and Sprint to place calls to Europe and other places outside the U.S. - thus the apt name: World Edition.
Most people who buy the BlackBerry 8830 will buy it for just this reason. However, they'll also be pleased to discover the ample bonus features and improvements the 8830 offers over the 8800. One such area of vast improvement, as luck would have it, is in the way of multimedia.
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The BlackBerry 8830 is more than a smartphone. It's also a digital multimedia player with the ability to listen to MP3s, watch videos, and store, organize, view, and share photos.
The look and feel of the BlackBerry 8830 is exactly the same as that of the BlackBerry 8800, with the same size and shape, the same QWERTY-keyboard, and the same trackball mounted in the center (which you either love or you hate, depending totally on preference). One exception to this sameness, however, is the stylish new silver and chrome exterior.
Like its predecessor, the BlackBerry 8830 World Edition also comes with a powerful internal GPS that touts, as one of its features, a lower power consumption than other competing GPSs. It also supports the "Assisted GPS" feature that lets users access the closest cellular tower near them for faster fixes. The GPS includes a fully-featured map system that can even grab addresses out of your address book.
Also the same in the 8830 is the fantastic 320 x 240 pixel LCD display, the long-lasting battery, and a useful microSD card slot. Speaking of the SD card slot, having just taken a look at the BlackBerry Curve it suddenly becomes apparent that the BlackBerry 8830 (like its predecessor) graciously doesn't make you remove the battery to insert or remove the SD card, while both the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl do. Score another point for the BlackBerry World Edition.
As with most web-enabled BlackBerry products, the browser on the 8830 is well below-average. But at least the email interface is nice.
On the downside, maybe the makers should have improved upon certain other features of the 8800 for this new World Edition, like the keyboard. Unlike on so many other great smart phones (including some from RIM as a matter of fact) the keys on the 8830 are squishy, too small, and hard to press without other keys getting in the way. That would get annoying fast.
One feature you will find notably absent in the BlackBerry 8830 is a built-in digital camera, which implies that the targeted user of this device is more the business/corporate user than the general consumer (as evidenced by the global World Edition focus). With the inclusion of the versatile multimedia player, then, this means that a U.S. businessperson can view their family photos while travelling abroad and correspond with them from all over Europe. They just can't take any pictures with it to send back home. 
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