As much as I claim to have a cutting edge mobile phone (N82), my other mobile phone sucks. Period. Why two phones, you may ask.

One, I prefer to keep my personal and professional life separate. None of my colleagues, barring a select few, have my personal number, and none of my friends, barring a very few close ones, have the official number.

Two, my 2nd phone obviously is a Reliance handset. That means CDMA. That means really pathetic handsets. That means a good handset on Reliance comes out, and about 4 million people on the Reliance Network have it (Nokia 6275 and its ’state-of-the-art’ 2 megapixel camera). But, that also means more congestion resistant networks. Yes, its true. Anyone who’d been to a cricket match in India (the ultimate test for mobile phone congestion) knows how well the Reliance/TATA networks perform in comparision to the GSM Networks. That was until the Blackberry came out.

Reliance currently does six different Blackberry handsets, with top of the line being the Blackberry 8830 World Edition. I’ve been tempted to get that, but that would also mean I’m stuck to CDMA, which would be a good thing. Or would it? There began my quest for a good business phone.

For starters, I’m not too impressed with the Blackberry. Lets take all the entertainment features aside (Camera, Music player etc aside) for the basis of this discussion. For the sake of convenience, I’m comparing this to a Nokia E51/E71/E63(rumoured) Round one to the Blackberry, even before the competition begins. Blackberry on CDMA, Nokia not on CDMA.

IMO, a business phone should have all forms of connectivity. On the Nokia side, on the E71, you have GPRS, HSCSD, EDGE, 3G, WLAN, IR and a microUSB interface. On the 8830 we have GPRS, EDGE and mini-USB. Round two, hands down Nokia. Push Email is important, of course, but I can get really really close to Push Email with the new Nokia Email client, which is obviously good. Really not much of a winner here. Maps and GPS. Winner. Nokia.

I’m a sucker for open source stuff, and there are not too many applications available for the Blackberry. Stack that against the Symbian Applications available, and I really don’t have to mention the winner. So, for now, looks like the debate is going to continue. I may sound heavily biased towards a Nokia E Series right now, but I’m open to ideas.

PS:- Sachin, thanks for the comment. That was the motivation for this post. As you can see, I really cannot say if I’d go for a Blackberry at this point. With regards to a Blackberry 8310, I’d think its waaay too ‘2005′ for me. Try the E51 instead. More value for money.

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