ITWeek take a look at BlackBerry 8700g, the latest of RIM's wireless email device that features higher resolution screen and a new, slightly smaller keyboard layout.

Available now from T-Mobile, the 8700g is the first BlackBerry with an Intel XScale chip. However, its most important features are the familiar BlackBerry functions of push email, phone capability and web browsing. We found the 8700g generally easy to use and very responsive. A thumbwheel and escape/back button on the side of the device let users speedily navigate and select functions, while the 320x240 colour screen is bright and clear and is one of the best we have seen on any handheld.

RIM has made some changes to the user interface to speed common functions such as email composition. There is now an autocomplete feature that fills in as you type an address, and users can search the address book directly from an email via a click of the thumbwheel. The user interface now supports various themes, analogous to the desktop themes on Windows PCs. Our review unit featured a handful of these, some of which arrange functions as animated icons while others show a more minimal list.

The BlackBerry 8700g also has an improved browser to offer a better web experience, but we found its display of pages less satisfactory than that of newer Windows Mobile devices such as O2's XDA Mini S. We tried out the built-in viewers for email file attachments such as Microsoft Office documents and found that they worked to a certain degree, but could be improved. For example, viewing an attached Word document shows the text, but does not seem to preserve the formatting.