RIM has a fight on its hands with the BlackBerry. There was a time when, as a mobile e-mail device, it was in a very small group indeed. But not today. Nokia's Series 60 and Windows Mobile make mobile e-mail a breeze, and the smartphones they power are also competent multimedia devices.

RIM's challenge is to turn its BlackBerry e-mail-centric device into an all-rounder without losing its ease-of-use or corporate fans where e-mail is concerned. This is what the BlackBerry 8800 tries to do. Orange, O2 and Vodafone seem to think the 8800 puts on a good show as they are all stocking it. Our review sample came from Vodafone.

The 8800 brings ideas first seen in the candybar-style BlackBerry Pearl, with its SureType text entry system, across to an 'original' sized, wide format device with a full QWERTY mini-keyboard. Most notably these ideas include a sleek black shiny exterior and a miniature trackball that sits under the screen and takes over from the scroll wheel for navigating through information.

The mini trackball caters for four-directional scrolling rather than just up and down, and the scroll wheel itself is no more. How will anyone upgrading from an earlier device cope with the absence of this fundamental feature, we wonder?

Probably they'll content themselves with the new built-in GPS, image viewer and media player while wondering why RIM couldn't manage to include Wi-Fi or make the 8800 3G-capable, or include a camera. Well, you win some, you lose some.

The screen is quite small on this device at just 2.5 diagonal inches. Its 320 x 240 pixels is fairly standard, though, and we found it easy to view indoors and out, which is vital for a mobile e-mail device. The mini keyboard houses fairly large keys and we found we could tap out e-mails pretty quickly using fingertips on the keys. If you have fat fingers you might be more challenged than us here.

This new BlackBerry has just 64MB of internal memory, but you can augment it with microSD cards. Unfortunately, cards live under the battery which makes them a bit fiddly to swap in and out.

In general the non-e-mail related features aren't as advanced as they are in some other smartphones, and the BlackBerry 8800 remains primarily an e-mail device with some other extras built in, rather than a strong all-rounder. It is definitely more for professionals than consumers, and I guess we shouldn't expect it to be any other way.

A final word of warning: steer clear of this device if you are the smudgy-fingered type, as its casing picks up grease easily.

RIM has brought the looks of the QWERTY BlackBerry up to date with the 8800, and the GPS will be a boon to many. But it is a much less 'whizz-bang' device than much of the competition, and no doubt many people will miss the scroll wheel.