If you're looking for a portable game machine I hear Nintendo sells them pretty cheaply--and with a far better selection of games than the typical cellphone. (Or there's always my personal favorite, the NeoGeo Pocket Color.)

The Blackberry is primarily a device for doing email/text messaging, calendar and to-do organization, and a little web browsing. It's really intended to be a personal organizer.

The unit itself feels quite sturdy, but keep in mind it has a quite large LCD screen. It feels pretty solid overall, but I bet it'll scratch pretty easily, and it isn't something that can be safely carried in a pocket without some sort of protective cover.

Battery lifetimes are good, and I seem to get about 7-10 days from mine (although I have it set up to shut itself off at night). It charges pretty quickly, probably in 2-3 hours.

The Blackberry happens to have a voice cellphone built in, but it's not the best choice for this purpose. It is NOT a cellphone in the usual sense and it's not really trying to be one, if for no other reason than its size and shape would make it really annoying to use without a headset. It works, but a dedicated cellphone will work better for that one purpose. (But I definitely haven't had the problems with feedback from the headset mentioned by one of the other reviewers. My headset works just peachy-keen.)

There are a couple of nice features in the address book I really like. There are extra user-definable fields for additional phone numbers/email addresses besides the usual home/office/cell etc. There's also a Notes field, handy for keeping track of who wants to be called when and such.

It also has a Java engine and I've found it reasonably easy to get my own applets running on it. (It doesn't appear to handle standard .jad/.jar applets, at least as delivered from T-Mobile. I had to rebuild mine to get them to run.) Again, it's not a games machine.

The UI is easy and intuitive to use, and I've grown fond of the wheel for doing menu selections. Occasionally it seems like I have to click the wheel one too many times to do something; it'd be nice if there were more (and user-definable) keyboard shortcuts.

The calendar book is OK. It works best if you're doing a standard 9-5 M-F workweek, as it only displays about 8 hours on the weekly summary screen and you need to scroll around to see the rest of a given day. It's been reliable so far with no lost appointments. The one annoyance is that reminders only appear to sound once, and if you miss one you won't be reminded again until you happen to look at the screen.

The web browser is so-so. It works best with WAP/WML pages of course. Some HTML/XHTML pages will display but there are going to be compromises because of the small display size, and not every page works (I've seen a number of strange error messages when trying to browse random HTML pages). However, I find it reasonably useful for reading news.google.com, maps.yahoo.com, etc., and it works for displaying pictures. In other words I've found the browser is handy when I *need* to use it, but I wouldn't use it to just "surf the web".

I find the mail reader easy to deal with, but I've only used it with T-Mobile's mail server. Any issues with email forwarding are between you and your current ISP; it's really not T-Mobile's fault if your ISP is incompetent. I also don't run Exchange or any of that nonsense.

I also don't try to sync with any desktop programs, as I rely entirely on the Blackberry for all that stuff. Supposedly the next major release of the Blackberry OS (an upgrade will be available, presumably for free) will make synching a lot easier and more reliable--so you may want to wait if this is an important feature for you.

Other nice features include AutoType (completes various abbreviated words on the fly while entering text, and you can add your own abbreviations), a simplistic but usable Todo manager, and an auto power-off feature for saving batteries (which is also a great way to stop people from calling at 3am).

In summary: it does everything I want, and does most of it very well. It doesn't run Windows apps... but for some reason I'd consider that to be a serious feature in its favor; I leave the software alone, it does its job, everbody's happy.

If you really need all the bells-and-whistles from a Pocket PC thingy (along with all the headaches, crashes, viruses and other typical Microsoft-delivered woes), then that's really what you should get. If you want to play games Nintendos are cheap and a lot more fun than a Java-based phone. There are much, much cheaper cellphones available.

But for what it is I find the Blackberry to be quite handy. It was a huge improvement over my Motorola T721. It's a compromise--most multifunctional devices are--but I can live with its limitations.

So we got two T-Mobile units. It took us about 12 hrs to get it all setup, and we got most of what we wanted, but not all of it. So count on spending quite some time figuring out the various e-mail options, and playing with them until they work.

What you really want is the e-mail redirector, which gives you full access to your mailbox. Unfortunately it runs only with corporate e-mail accounts (Exchange & Domino) and is useless with standard ISP e-mail accounts. That was the biggest setback and disappointment.

Trying to find out solutions to handle the ISP accounts took the longest. You can use T-Mobile's webclient re-direct, but it's not obvious how it is setup and does not have any forwarding filters (which is too bad with today's spam volumes).

Setting up forwarding rules on Outlook provides more flexibility, but you really need redirector software, not just forwarding - otherwise the from: address is always yourself. I found two pieces of shareware, but they required installation on both ends, and that didn't work out with the Blackberry.

So we went with the T-Mobile redirect and its working, but not ideal.

No complaints about T-Mobile so far. When I had to deal with them, they were easy to work with, and amazon takes care of most of the work, as the phones arrive pre-activated.

Summary: Probably still the best mobile e-mail solution around, but the software integration has plenty of room for improvement. The hardware is great though - the gold standard in terms of usability and features.