Sour berry

With the realization that I will be traveling a lot in the coming months — as I write this, I’m sitting on my dad’s couch in the DC suburbs — I picked up a Blackberry yesterday. Yes, I bought into the hype, but just hours later I’m realizing that it was only hype.
It’s a real pain to get it set up; mostly because there is no real help available. Most annoyingly, when using the web browser on my Cingular-branded unit, the official Blackberry website won’t work because, it says, you must use a Blackberry device to access it. Turns out that Cingular puts their own browser on the thing, leaving you with a “fake” Blackberry.
It won’t access my IMAP email and show me all the messages sitting in my account, it only shows new ones that come in. And it refused to connect to my email at all until I went into my email server and allowed clear text passwords — there was no help available for why it wasn’t connecting, I had to figure it out myself.
Their email system does not offer any kind of spam control.
The interface is a bit annoying, what with the scroll wheel to access menus. But the major problem is the price. With taxes and fees, Cingular’s service — for the data only, not voice — comes to $65 per month, far more than the $49 they advertise.
So, in fact, I’m paying $65 each month so that I can receive tons of spam wherever I am.
If you’re the kind of person who relies on being available every moment and email is your lifeline, sure, this might work for you. But if you, like me, can wait until you get to a wifi access point to get your email, the Blackberry is a huge, unnecessary expense. If they could price the service at a more reasonable $29 a month, I’d keep it. But when their service price is twice the cost of a DSL line, with far less service options, well…
I’ll be going back to the store when I get home.