The company says it'll run two weeks without a recharge. The Alert feature can be set to sound a tone, vibrate, make both a tone and vibrate, or show an on-screen message. Like the Palm, the BlackBerry displays a reminder message on the screen about pending appointments. Being a Palm veteran, I kept tapping the screen but the message wouldn't go away. Then I remembered that I had to press the Escape key on the BlackBerry instead.
Old habits die hard.
On the BlackBerry, to type punctuation marks and numbers, I must press the orange Alt key with the appropriate key. The punctuation marks are like specks of dust. The keyboard does include a very handy Delete key, which is used to get rid of typos, old messages and appointments in one click. I decided to enter the information by using my desktop computer, and then syncing the data over to the BlackBerry. A shortcoming on the BlackBerry as well as the Palm is that they truncate long messages, and I have to activate the device to get the rest of the message.