My bitching about the cheap hunk-of-junk phone my crew gave me after my beloved LG50 bit the dust has now resulted in my being presented by my very own CrackBerry – a shiny new BlackBerry^TM 8703e. I had a couple hours to play around with it this afternoon before heading home to the valley of no cell reception, and I have a couple of initial observations.

• Now I understand why BlackBerry users seem to be shouting at their phones all the time the unit is so short that the microphone is back by the middle of your cheek, hence the tendency to yell.
  
• What an amazingly right-handed device. The thumb-wheel is a thumb-wheel for righties only. It's a good thing that I'm partially ambidextrous, though I don't quite have the fine motor control in my right thumb to really move smoothly through the menus.
  
• I may need to get a bigger flashlight.

Those of you who know me in RL will understand what I mean by that last one.

As a long-time Palm user (I still have my Palm IIIc), I'll probably wind up with a Treo, but I'm going to give this thing a spin for the next couple of weeks.