When it was announced at the 3GSM World Congress in 2007, the BlackBerry 8800 was the slimmest smartphone from RIM to date.
It used similar materials and finish to the highly successful
Pearl 8100 device and featured a “highly tactile QWERTY keyboard and RIM's user-friendly trackball navigation system”.
It was a departure from the traditional corporate-centric BlackBerry devices with more consumer-oriented features including a media player and microSD expandable memory card slot for music and videos.
The built-in GPS supported a wide variety of location-based applications and services, including BlackBerry Maps which was able to integrate with other BlackBerry applications allowing users to do things such as generating a map from an address in their address book or send maps via email.