It’s been a great three weeks testing out the Flip. I’ve really enjoyed playing with the phone and getting the chance to share the reviews. It’s been very interesting to read through the comments on the posts, as well as the posts done by the other reviewers. Overall, I think the first set of team-member product reviews has been pretty successful.

After looking over what I’ve already written and staring at the Flip sitting here in its box, I find myself pondering the question: “So what’s the bottom line?”

1. AMAZING screen. I don’t think I mentioned this before now, but the screen is bright, clear and great to look at.
2. Decent camera. The camera takes good pictures – for a phone.
3. AppWorld. It’s a great way to get things installed on the phone.
4. Applications. The bundled applications, along with the availability of decent applications make the BlackBerry a super-functional platform in any form factor.
5. Email. BlackBerrys are email devices, and always have been.

1. Keyboard. The lack of a QWERTY keyboard is the biggest issue I had with the phone. Talking to people who have been long-time Pearl users, the keyboard does certainly get easier to use the longer you have it. But with my usage (need to key in Twitter usernames, login IDs for websites and lots of strange email addresses) the SureType system isn’t.
2. Battery Life. The battery life was passable, but for something that is notably thicker than many other phones on the market the battery should be spectacular.
3. Casing. I understand that the Flip is geared as a ‘Consumer’ phone, and isn’t targeted at higher-end customers, but the casing feels cheap – a sentiment shared by a large number of people that came by my desk to check out the phone.

The phone is a pretty good entry-level BlackBerry, but the lack of a good keyboard and the overall form factor aren’t for me. Given the choice I’d stick with my Curve.

I’ve been a BlackBerry user for the past 6 months or so, and before that I had used a couple of other Windows-based smart phones. The biggest difference that I noticed when I moved to the BlackBerry was that the device seemed to be designed around being a great email tool. All email functionality seemed to be very well thought out, and synchronization with my corporate TELUS email account was flawless.

With the Flip, I decided to point my Gmail account at the device in hopes of using it for my personal email, this is where I ran into my first major snag with the device: Email synchronization.

Up to this point, whenever I’d been using the BlackBerry email client, it was leveraging the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). BES is what allows the BlackBerry to securely interface with TELUS’ internal mail servers. Using BES email is perfectly synchronized and changes in my inbox show up on the BlackBerry in seconds.

With the Flip, I set up my Gmail account using the built-in wizard. Because the email client on the phone is the same as the one I was using on my Curve I expected everything to work the same way. It doesn’t. Because the link to Gmail is working over an older (and unencrypted I’d bet) POP3 connection there’s no way to synchronize the status of messages (whether they’ve been read, deleted, flagged etc). This causes all mail downloaded to the BlackBerry to essentially be a copy of what was in the inbox when the message was downloaded.

I’ll talk about another way to get your email working on the Flip (for Gmail at least) in my next post. But for now my email experience, for personal email at least, has been less than ideal.