Love @ First Sight?

First Impression: NICE!

Now, keep in mind, I've been dealing with the 7100i for the past few years.

At first it was tricky to get used to the 7100i keyboard... visually I believe the interruption of the color of the numbered keys was designed to be an aid but caused a mental hiccup when using it as a keyboard. My eyes wanted to follow the grey back and black text pattern, not the line that the letters were on. Not disimilar to the supermarkets of old that used to change the tile pattern in the middle of the aisles to make you subconsiously recognize the change and consiously try to identify it (it was presumably a psycological experiment designed to make the shopper stop as a result of the change in pattern and think "hmm, I must have just missed something" and go back to pick up something they didn't want).

Anyway, the 7100i was a far cry from it's predecessor, the 7520.

At it's time a great device but soon became just too bulky when compared with it's sucessor. Also the Direct Connect Button being on the top wasn't the best design. Not terrible but completely different than any other Nextel device up until this point.

Initially it seems a bit bigger than other carrier Curves. Again, like the 7520 and the 7100i it seems that RIM made this Blackberry based on an existing model and just kind of cramed in the Direct Connect somewehere. In this case it seems to have taken the place of the Voice Dialing button found on other Curves. Connecting to the Nextel network was not a problem on first starting it up, nor was activating it on my BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). Looking forward to start using it and write more as I uncover more.