[ockfish]

This is my favorite part of my 9000. The external speakers blow away my wife's 9700. As much as I want the 9800, if it has crappy speakers-------I may not pull the trigger.

[Pete6]

The 9000 probably has the best set of speakers on any cell phone ever. RIM spent a lot of time on research for the 9000's sound system. It is therefore doubtful that the 9800 will have speakers/sound system any better than the 9700.

I do not know this for a fact but the known form factor would seem to indicate this.

RIM seems to have abandoned a lot of the very expensive research and testing that they put into the 9000 which was supposed to be all things good in a cell phone. It had:
- radical memory allocation - now gone.
- a keyboard that was proven, yes proven by testing to be faster and more accurate to type on - now gone.
- a great sound system with acoustic pipes (like in the Bose wave radio) for good sound - now gone.

[zeromaru]

- radical memory allocation - now gone.

care to explain that one ?

[Ezcal]

care to explain that one ?

I believe he means that when the 9000 came out, it had a huge amount of on-board memory, compared to other phones at the time. Now, BlackBerry phones have a comparatively small amount of memory.

[Pete6]

care to explain that one ?

1Gb memory on board comprising:
- 128Mb Device Memory
- 896Mb private internal memory that was not removable but could be blocked off via BES.

This made the 9000's memory very secure indeed.

It has not been used since.