BlackBerry 7290 Experience

After getting rid of my XDA Exec (imate jasjar) and reading reviews of many other email devices, I finally bought the BlackBerry 7290. The main reason for buying this device was to have something in my backpack to occasionally reply emails and little online news browsing during daily train travels.

Good stuff:
The device looked and felt cool in hands, with one of the coolest screens I have ever seen. The graphics on the screen seemed like a real picture pasted under the display even without backlight turned on. The screen however does not seems sharp enough in dark with the backlight turned on.

The full qwerty type keyboard is nicely designed with keys nicely spaced for easy typing. There is even a keyboard backlight that illuminates with the screen’s backlight.

Shocked & Disappointed:
I had known the basic concept of push type email technology used in BlackBerry devices, in conjunction with their servers installed at your enterprise. I also knew that you have to get the BlackBerry service activated with your GSM provider to use this push email feature. While I was browsing through the BlackBerry website, and I briefly looked at the POP3 keyword and experienced the flash demo of their cool web browser, which led me into impression that the browser and standard PULL type pop3 emails could be used over the standard GPRS enabled SIM.

I was hugely disappointed when I discovered that:

- The device can’t do POP3 (actually its forced not to do so) and hence can’t pull emails
- There is no web browser ???? The web browser is actually installed remotely on the devices once you get your subscription activated
- Hence, the device can be only used as a normal GSM phone and the keyboard can be used for typing SMS messages, without any GPRS functionality.

After discovering the above, I decided to get the BlackBerry subscription activated from my service provider and use their online services to push the emails to my 7290 device. I was again disappointed on discovering that my GSM provider would pull my emails from my server only every 15 minutes and push them to me as if there are any new messages.

I hated this new idea due to the facts that:

- 15 minutes is an extremely long time for a guy like me to wait for the new emails. Even with my little K750i, I can check my emails automatically every 5 minutes or manually at any instance.
- I don’t feel good knowing that my emails are being relayed/stored by a third party in middle. I only feel comfortable by having a direct TCP connection between by handheld device and my POP3 server.

I also found some other ways on the forums for instant access, like enabling forwarding on my mailbox, but not sure how my BlackBerry device will treat that, since TO: and FROM: information would be changed in the email headers during forwarding.

There was another way that I read somewhere, where you can run some application on your PC the whole time that would relay your emails to your handheld. Being a pro-energy efficient guy, I did not like even this idea.

Most probably this cool peice of hardware with the worst kind of restrictions would end up in ebay this week. I guess I will have to wait until the P990 has been released before wasting my time and money with any other smartphone.

Talha