BlackBerry 7130e

Verizon Blackberry 7130e Sprint BlackBerry 7130e
Get Connected with the Blackberry 7130 or 7130e on the Verizon or Sprint Network

When you’re ready to purchase a Blackberry phone or Blackberry accessories, make eAccess Solutions your first stop. The Blackberry 7130e offers a robust solution for your e-mail, PDA and cell phone needs. This Blackberry phone features SureType technology for accurate, dependable typing on its keyboard. Use the 7130e with your laptop for a fast EVDO high speed data connection as well. Read our Blackberry 7130 and 7130e Review below. eAccess can ship your order on the very same day from our in-house inventory. Click around our site to find what you need or contact us at 1-847-991-7190 for further details about our devices and Blackberry accessories.

Sprint (Dual-Band 7130e):  USA, Canada

BlackBerry 7130e Review:

The BlackBerry 7130e brings high-speed EV-DO networking to this popular line of e-mail devices. That makes for an irony: This handheld shines most brightly when tethered to a PC.

The year-old BlackBerry 7100 series line delivers push e-mail in a more phone-like shape. It does so by using a hybrid keyboard where two letters share most keys. An advanced predictive-text system learns your vocabulary—by absorbing the contents of your address book, calendar, and the words you type in e-mails which means that eventually, you double-tap less. Testing it out for a few minutes isn't enough to give you a real feel for it, because it takes a while for the BlackBerry to learn your vocabulary.

At 4.6 by 2.2 by 0.9 inches (HWD) and 4.6 ounces, the 7130e is a little thicker, chunkier, and heavier than the 7100t and 7100g, but holding it is still relatively comfortable. Like its predecessors, the 7130e has a bright, sharp 240-by-260 color screen, and it can hook up to corporate BlackBerry servers, Microsoft Exchange, and Lotus Notes e-mail (via a desktop redirector program). Individuals will probably use Verizon's Web client, which integrates up to ten POP3, IMAP, AOL, or Hotmail e-mail accounts. The included desktop software syncs contacts, calendars, notes, and tasks with a wide range of desktop apps quickly and easily.

The 7130e's real innovation is using the EV-DO network, which gives download speeds five times as fast as the EDGE network or the 1xRTT network used by previous BlackBerrys. We hooked our BlackBerry up to a PC to use as a modem with the included mini USB cable. It produced impressive download speeds that ranged from 680 Kbps to 794 Kbps, on a par with a dedicated PC Card modem.

Since the BlackBerry e-mail system is optimized for slower networks, the fast EV-DO network doesn't shine quite as brightly when you're using the BlackBerry as a handheld. The system just doesn't transmit enough data for EV-DO's speed to become important. E-mails arrived at the same speed as on a T-Mobile BlackBerry 7105t, which uses the much slower GPRS network. As the BlackBerry Internet Service boils most attachments down to formatted text, we didn't see much of an advantage there, either, though scrolling down through attachments was noticeably snappier on the 7130e than on the 7105t.

Web browsing was definitely faster with EV-DO but not by the tenfold difference we'd expect from sheer throughput speeds; pages like www.expedia.com downloaded and displayed two to three times as quickly on the 7130e as on the 7105t.

As a phone, the 7130e delivers loud and clear sound from its earpiece. The microphone successfully masked construction noise when we made a call from a busy outdoor area. The speakerphone is spectacular and loud enough for indoor and outdoor use. We paired the BlackBerry 7130e successfully with Bluetooth headsets; the limited Bluetooth 2.0 implementation allows for headsets and syncing with desktop computers, but not dial-up networking or file transfer. As is typical with BlackBerrys, there's no voice dialing. Talk time is just less than 4 hours, which isn't bad for a phone. In comparison, the PalmOne Treo 650 offers 4.5 hours of talk time.