In general, setting up corporate and personal e-mail is pretty zippy on the 8700g because you can do it directly from the device. To set up for use with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, you simply click the "Enterprise Activation" icon on the home screen, enter an e-mail address and an IT-provided activation password, and the device syncs your work mail, calendar, task list, memos and contacts.

For personal accounts, click the "Set up Internet e-mail" icon, and you're whisked to an online setup screen. In most cases, you simply enter an e-mail address and password, and in about 20 minutes mail starts hitting the in-box. The device supports up to 10 corporate/personal accounts.

Icons appear on the home screen for each e-mail account you create, but you can turn those off. All mail appears in your main in-box. Sync features vary depending on which online e-mail service you're using, but, for example, if you send e-mail from your Yahoo account via the 8700g, it'll appear in your sent folder when you log onto Yahoo mail on a computer.

Composing e-mail and text messages is also slightly faster now that you can highlight and click on an address or phone number in any e-mail, calendar entry or text message to launch them. And when you start to enter an e-mail address, matching entries in the address book automatically appear in a drop-down menu.

I had mixed results opening attachments on the 8700g, which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and WordPerfect file formats as well as JPEG, GIF and PNG images. The Word documents lost some formatting, and two Excel files didn't display properly. I had more success with a couple of PowerPoint files.