Hello, Blackberry. (Bad news for Palm)

I have been a loyal Palm user since day one. Since that very first Pilot. But with my ongoing hotsync crash problems, and with a recent upgrade at work to Exchange Server 2007, well, the time had come to give Crackberry, err, Blackberry a try...

There are a lot of Pearl devotees where I work, but I'd rather a full keyboard. So a just recently released Curve 8310 was delivered to my office yesterday:

Initial impressions? Compared to my Treo 650, it is light. And thin. But the plastic housing doesn't feel quite as high quality as the Treo. The keyboard is superb - even better than the Treo's keyboard!

I'm still waiting for my IT department to set up my Exchance syncing, so I cannot comment on that yet. But I found it very interesting that the first three things I added to the device were Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Maps.

The Opera Mini browser is probably next. Then it is off to find the best news feeds, discussion forums, and software repositories...