I've just made the move from the Treo 650 to the 8700c. I started with the Treo 600 shortly after they were introduced (2003?) & have been using the Treo 650 for the past two years.
To their credit, the modern Treos are way up the alpha-geek scale. The idea of carrying an all-in-one device is very appealing - phone, pda, e-mail, internet, mp3 player.
The Palm developer community is huge & the breadth of 3rd-party applications is staggering. Thanks to the historic stance that companies have taken regarding employees' PDAs (We ain't paying for it!), the software is dirt cheap.
So, given these advantages, why would a card-carrying Treo fanboy like me voluntarily switch to Blackberry? In a word: stability. The Treo, while a worthy jack of all trades, is at heart only a master of the PDA functions. It's disconcerting to have your phone spontaneously reboot while in the middle of a call. It's frustrating (& can be career-limiting) fiddling with desktop redirector software to get your Outlook email. It's tiresome to be tethered to an AC outlet every night.
I've had the 8700c for 2 weeks and can already see that I will not go back to the Treo. The Blackberry doesn't reach as far & consequently hits its intended target: a business e-mail tool that packs a top-knotch phone in the same package. I was dissapointed by the seemingly rudimentary PDA functionality - but a quick OS upgrade & application of the Dimension Today theme bring it up to my level of expectation.
The only thing I haven't found that I'm really looking for is a Blackberry version of KeyCaps650 - which allow double-taps to produce ALTed characters.
tdh
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