Even though BlackBerry devices are a hit with e-mail junkies, you usually don’t see road warriors or anyone else holding these devices up to their ears to make calls. The reason? BlackBerries are a little too wide and don’t have that traditional phone look and feel. RIM aims to attract a much larger smart phone crowd with its 7100t, which weighs a featherlight 3.9 ounces, sports a high-resolution color display, and delivers the same always-on e-mail that made BlackBerry a household name. The best part is that this smart world phone costs less than $200. The question is what you give up for the more mainstream design.

In order to make the device slim enough to be considered a phone first, RIM crammed 20 keys on the 7100t’s QWERTY layout, compared with 33 keys found on traditional BlackBerries. As a result, two letters are assigned to 13 of those 20 keys. For BlackBerry devotees, this represents a seismic shift in the way text is entered. For people accustomed to banging out text messages using a phone’s dialpad and crude prediction technologies like T9, the layout presents much less of a learning curve.

We call T9 crude because RIM’s engineers have done it one better with its SureType technology. While you could use the multitap method to type—for example, press the QW key twice to get a W—SureType pulls from a built-in 35,000-word library to predict the word you want to enter based on the order in which you strike the keys. It’s also smart enough to associate terms with items in your address book, like names and cities, and even learn new words based on the frequency with which you use them.

Still, learning this new system takes some time. On many an occasion, we felt as if we our thumbs were right on top of one another. Also, typing gets bogged down when what you enter a combination of letters that could result in a number of different words. For instance, when we tried to type the word “see” using the UI and AS keys, a menu popped us prompting us to select either “are” or “see”. This quirk really disrupts the flow of typing until you get used to it.

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