For starters, I used to have a Blackberry through Nextel and when my contract was up about six months ago, I switched to Cingular and got a smaller Motorola phone that was supposed to be capable of email and internet but it wasn't very good at either. Actually, I still have the phone but said adios to Nextel.
I really missed my Blackberry but it didn't have bluetooth and Nextel phones aren't compatible with Cingular. Because the phone I started with at Cingular was basically free (after rebate), I went to a Cingular store and upgraded to a new Blackberry with bluetooth (7290) so I was able to keep using my bluetooth headset. It's been pretty painless because I was able to import my other Cingular phone's address book on to the Blackberry and get email set up quickly but there's the one nagging problem that I had with my first Blackberry. That is, there weren't any keyboards available that were compatible with the Blackberry. One company that made the keyboards that worked with the older Blackberrys told me that they couldn't get the code from RIM for the newer ones so I was stuck with calloused thumbs. Has that situation changed at all? There are times when I just really want to use a big keyboard.
There are a few (two?) Bluetooth keyboards available for the 7290. If you look in the Bluetooth forum on here there should be lots of information on the BT keyboards. I have not seen any wired keyboards for the 7290s.
Thanks, NJ, it would take a while before I stumbled on the right forum. Both of the ones mentioned have their good points. The $189 keyboard has a built-in rechargeable battery and is waterproof but since it's so flexible, you'd need a flat surface to make it truly effective. It also lacks a kind of dock for the blackberry which would make it difficult to view as you typed. The other one folds up which makes it a little more cumbersome to store in a backpack, for example, but it has the dock and its more rigid design would make it easy to use in your lap, for example. It's also a lot cheaper. I'm glad that there are keyboards out there. I'm presuming that you couldn't just plug any old windows USB keyboard in to a blackberry successfully since it may be problematic being able to load the driver.
External Keyboard
