I got to play with both the new BlackBerry Curve models for IT Pro recently and now the review is up. The design of the Curve 8300 enabled RIM to fit in a full size QWERTY keyboard and a large enough battery to deliver the excellent life BlackBerry users are accustomed to, while still producing something small enough to carry everywhere with you. Adding an extra radio for GPS or Wi-Fi on these devices means even more options but has RIM managed to keep the impressive battery life as well? And as you can only have one extra radio - which one should you choose?Read on!

Somehow the 8800 doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl and it doesn't have WiFi or 3G. But with GPS and a QWERTY keyboard it's undoubtedly a more capable business device, especially if you want a BlackBerry with a full keyboard. Read what else I have to say about the shiny BlackBerry 8800...

Rummaging around for another link I found the second part of my PDA/smartphone buying guides on Tom's Hardware...

Smartphones have plenty of tools and services, but if you don't fancy viewing them on a very small screen and using them with a couple of softkeys and a four-way controller, look at a PDA phone. You get the widest choice of applications and input, plus a bigger screen-and you don't have to sacrifice phone features either.

If you've used a PDA already, you'll find the familiar names and operating systems here like Palm and iPAQ, alongside Symbian devices from phone manufactures such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson. As with smartphones, many Windows Mobile devices are made by HTC and branded by the operators (the T-Mobile Dash, the O2 XDA range, the Orange SPV models and the Cingular and Verizon own-brand models), though HTC now uses its own brand as well as i-mate and Qtek and other Pocket PC manufacturers like Samsung and Mio have phone models now. Blackberry isn't just for business users and the Sidekick may not have as many applications as other devices but it's more like a PDA than a pager these days. Read the rest...

In my DevReg piece about Implementing InfoCard and the identity metasystem, I said that IinfoCard is 'less a replacement and more of an antidote' to Passport. One reader rightly points out TRevin's post that InfoCard supplements rather than replaces Passport

Perhaps I should have said successor; it's a replacement in the sense that MSN et al will at least supplement their use of Passport with InfoCard logins that will be part of the identity metasystem if other sites choose to honour them - but it certainly doesn't work the same way or do the same thing and Pasport is adding infoCard to Passport rather than dropping the Passport system. I didn't have space to go into the claims handling and other basic functionality of InfoCard, which make it very different from Passport per se. The way I think of it - and the way Kim Cameron phrases it when people hail him as the slayer of Passport - is that that he was one in a long line of people to explain what was wrong with Passport and that acknowledgement led to a search for what would be right.

Incidentally, I wasn't able to read the MSN Spaces site from my BlackBerry the way I usually browse the Web on the go, because Vodafone marks it as potentailly adult content - and asks me to pay £1 to take the contnet block off my account. Admirable caution or nanny state? How many teenagers will have BlackBerry-capable SIMs? Surely the Sidekick is the teen BlackBerry?