TrustedReviews reviewed the T-Mobile BlackBerry 8700. Inside the 8700 is an Intel XScale CPU running at 312MHz. This is a huge leap forward in processing power compared with the old 7290 and it's very noticeable. The 8700 is very responsive and skips between menus and applications with missing a beat - plus there's no need for a soft reset every so often as with some smartphone devices. You also won't have any trouble travelling with the 8700 - it's a quad band handset and should work pretty much anywhere. It also supports EDGE as well as standard GPRS, helping speed up those data services.

There are some obvious improvements over the 7290, but the one that grabs you straight off the bat is the screen. The 2.4in colour screen has a resolution of 320 x 240 and to be blunt it looks great. The colours are vibrant, the icons are vivid and detailed, and it's viewable in almost any lighting condition. The latter is partly due to the new ambient light sensor which djusts the backlight according to how bright your surroundings are.

The 8700 is keen to be seen as a real out of office tool, and as such can view all sorts of documents, including Word files and Excel spreadsheets. It is also meant to be able to view PowerPoint presentations, but I encountered some issues here. I transferred several PowerPoint presentations to the 8700, but when I viewed them all I saw was the stripped out text. I mentioned this to RIM and was told that it was definitely possible to view PowerPoint slides - I was even treated to a demonstration as one of the guys showed me a PowerPoint presentation on his BlackBerry. However, when I returned home I tried once more to email myself a PowerPoint presentation and view it, but every time all I got was stripped out text. If I tried to force the device to view the slides I was presented with a big blue question mark. I do find this somewhat puzzling since I did see it working on another BlackBerry a matter of hours ago, but I do know that Sandra also could not view PowerPoint on an 8700, so I'm not alone on this one.