[vol_freak]

I've been using a blackberry for quite a while now. My first, (I don't recall the model) was one of the blue bodies and no color screen of course. I've had several others since and just recently got a new 8830WE.

I have to admit upfront that I've been a huge Palm/Treo fan through the years. Everything seemed pretty intuitive to me on the palm and I loved the touch screen. Of course, I could be biased since my palm days go back all the way to the Palm IIIx.

Up until now, I would never consider leaving my Treo for the blackberry. Im one of the guys who has carried around two phones. My treo for phone and contact management and the BB soley for email. So this is the first time I've considered using my BB for everything. I'm very impressed with many of the features of my 8830 and I love the form factor of the device. Not to mention, it seems that the Palm OS and the Treo are on the way out and blackberry appears to be the wave of the future.

My main gripe about the blackberry is contact management. My company has a BES and we use the latest version of Outlook. Is there any third party software that can beef up the contact management functions? It appears that you can only have 4 user defined fields on the BB? What I really would like to be able to do is link appointments and tasks to contacts. I used a software called Agendus on my Treo and it did exactly what I needed.

My other big gripe is appearance. Are there any applications or themes that can add some eye candy to the contacts/calendar/etc? The black text on white background gets really boring to me.

Thanks in advance for your feedback. With all of the other areas that blackberry excels it would be a no brainer to ditch my treo if I could address those couple of issues.