As an early birthday present, Kelly bought me a new BlackBerry Curve. It replaced my old 8700R which was a great device for the year and a half or so that I had it. The Curve feels like much more than a BlackBerry. Its got expandable storage in the form of a MicroSD socket, and a media player which can manage fullscreen video in a variety of formats, MP3s, ringtones and the multitude of photos captured with the built-in 2MP camera.

One personally long awaited feature over the 8700R is the Curve's Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking profile, which finally allows me to wirelessly tether my laptop and use the Curve as a modem to connect to the Internet when on the run, or train as the case often happens to be.

The upgrade itself from the 8700R to the Curve was surprisingly easy and painless -- having our own BlackBerry Enterprise Server means that besides our Outlook email, contacts, calendars, memos and tasks synchronizing wirelessly in near realtime, after activating the new device even call logs and settings were synchronized.

Pleasantly, the Curve also acts as a USB Mass Storage Device when a MicroSD card is installed. No special DRM software is required for importing or converting MP3s prior to transferring them onto the device, simple drag-and-drop works for MP3s, ringtones (which can be MP3s), video and photos. The media player also reads ID3 tags, and organizes your tunes by genre, artist and album. There's even a 3.5" stereo headphone jack, the first of it's kind on a BlackBerry.

We're still getting acquainted with each other, but so far, so good!