The big innovation is a built-in GPS receiver, turn-by-turn navigation software from TeleNav Inc. and BlackBerry Maps, which makes the 8800 a supremely useful tool for travelers of all kinds. This product also sports an elegantly slim industrial design that echoes some of the features of the splashy Pearl 8100, the phone-shaped device RIM introduced earlier this year.

A quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone, the 8800 is available in the U.S. from Cingular for $300 (with a two-year voice contract and rebate). In Canada, Rogers has it priced from $500 to $650 CDN depending on service contract.

I tested the Cingular version while traveling on vacation for two weeks. The GPS functionality was a huge time and hassle saver, although it's not perfect. Our group became very familiar with Miss BlackBerry, as we jokingly referred to the simulated voice used by the TeleNav software.

Under the hood, the 8800 features a 312 MHz XScale processor, 64MB of flash memory and expandable memory in the form of a microSD slot. The 1400 mAhr removable/rechargeable lithium cell has a rated life of 300 minutes talk time and 22 days standby time. I never had power problems even when using the navigation software all day. The 8800 also has a Bluetooth radio for connecting headsets.

The form factor is closer to traditional BlackBerry PDAs than the Pearl, and it has a full QWERTY thumb-keyboard. But the 8800 is narrower and thinner than past PDA models - 4.49 x 2.60 x 0.55 inches, 4.73 oz - and uses the Pearl's tiny but very effective trackball for navigating menus and Web pages. It also features a Pearl-like piano black and silver finish.

The keyboard and individual keys are also commensurately smaller than on past models and that can be a problem for the fat fingered and those with less than 20:20 vision. I found keying in numbers when using the phone to be excruciatingly slow. This is definitely not your aged father's cell phone - in more ways than one.

The numeric keypad is inset at the left-hand side of the QWERTY keyboard, with the W, E, R, S, D, F, Z, X and C keys doubling as number keys. Besides the letter keys, there's an ALT key that you need to hold down to type numbers in all other applications except the phone, plus Delete (Backspace) and Enter keys, two shift keys for typing upper case letters, and a symbol key that lets you input symbols, including those featured as ALT values on the letter keys and others.

Above the keyboard are larger dedicated Talk and End keys, and Menu and Back keys on either side of the trackball.

The TFT color LCD is excellent, though slightly smaller than on some other recent BlackBerry PDA phones. It measures about 2.5 inches diagonally, with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, and supports over 65,000 colors. Even when using the navigation software, which typically benefits from a bigger screen, I never had trouble reading from this screen.

It also has the light-sensing technology introduced in BlackBerry models a year or so ago that adjusts the LCD brightness to the amount of ambient light.

On the 8800's razor-thin left-hand edge, there's a Push-to-Talk (PTT) button (though Cingular isn't currently offering the PTT service), as well as USB and headphone jacks. On the right-hand edge, there are volume up and down keys.

Software
The application suite - besides the TeleNav navigation software, which we'll come to in a minute - is mostly fairly standard fare for a BlackBerry. It includes BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Internet Service e-mail, of course, plus personal information management (contacts, calendar, tasks, memo pad), voice notes, voice dialing and browser. All work similarly to past models.

The 8800 also comes with a media player (music, video, ringtones, digital images), PTT applet, Yahoo and BlackBerry Messenger software and, on the Cingular model, a separate applet for browsing the Cingular MEdia Net mobile Web service, which includes access to downloadable ringtones and other media as well as text-based content.

Like the Pearl, the 8800 is no great shakes as a music player - don't ditch your iPod just yet. But if you're traveling light, it will do in a pinch.

One problem is that it doesn't come with stereo headphones. The model I received included only a one-earbud hands-free telephone headset. And since the headphone jack is the tiny kind designed for hands-free phone headsets, you can't plug in a standard stereo headset. RIM will sell you a set of stereo earbuds that will work - for another $30. Or you can pick up an adapter from Radio Shack for about $5.

The 8800 does better as a video player and photo viewer. Its bright, high-resolution screen, though small screen makes images and video look pretty good, and the processor appears to be powerful enough to deliver reasonably smooth video playback. The Media Player supports many, though not all, popular audio and video formats. Seabyrd Technologies has the Blackberry Video Converter, a free downloadable utility for converting existing video to formats playable on the 8800.

Navigation
The navigation software is the real differentiator. It lets you look at maps, find businesses and airports and get turn-by-turn directions, either by selecting a business or airport or keying in an address. While the same TeleNav software (though apparently different maps) is available on other PDAs and many others have similar GPS applications, I don't know of any as tiny as the 8800 that include GPS functionality.

This has both advantages and disadvantages. One big advantage is that the 8800 works very nicely as a pedestrian navigator. The disadvantage is that it's not quite so good in the car. It does not come with an auto mounting kit and the screen is smaller than built-in auto navigators - and also smaller than non-phone handhelds such as the recently reviewed Hewlett-Packard iPAQ rx5900 Travel Companion.

But as with other GPS navigation tools, the software reads the turn-by-turn directions, so you don't really need to see map displays. That said, people sitting in the back seat of our mid-size car could see the 3D maps (2D also available) clearly enough to read street labels.

One criticism from my travel mates was that the voice wasn't always clear. There was certainly some distortion in the audio when it was cranked to maximum volume, but I had little difficulty understanding the directions when I was holding the device or had it on the seat between my legs while driving. The only exceptions were when windows were open in loud city environments or on the highway at speed.

Navigation software and mapping have improved since the technology first appeared, and the TeleNav software and BlackBerry Maps in the 8800 appear to be fairly state of the art. Miss BlackBerry occasionally got her left and right confused, but only when we had reached a destination. Once or twice, she said the destination was on the right when it was in fact on the left, or vice versa.

She also once got very confused about the location of a large private property. She wanted us to turn left where there was no road, only desert. I'm guessing that the perimeter of the property, a large resort near Sedona AZ, started at the point she wanted us to turn. In fact, the entrance was a few miles and a few turns away. Other than those glitches, Miss BlackBerry led us unerringly to our destinations—so long as we entered the correct address.

One other small quibble is that the very useful business finder function (restaurants, hotels, gas stations, etc.) does not list some kinds of destinations of interest to tourists, such as museums.

Bottom line: If you're a long-time BlackBerry fan who prefers the bigger screen and full QWERTY keyboard of the PDA models, the 8800 is a logical upgrade path. It's smaller and lighter than past models, supports more applications and functions. And most important, it offers GPS navigation, making it a dream come true for travelers.