I got my Blackberry 8100 finally yesterday afternoon, and playing with it for a day… I think it’s going to work out.

• The form factor is amazing (about the size of a SLVR) – this is the first time I’m carrying something phone-sized again (if you have a Treo, imagine it shrunken a centimeter on each dimension (including width – this thing is thinner than a closed RAZR)
• The email works like a charm (once it got provisioned on Cingular, it practically set itself up), and the default view is a merged inbox (SMS, MMS, various mail accounts), which I like. Setting up the network was simple and by and large, OTA installation of apps was a breeze (more about that later)
• Unlike my PPC-6700 (running WM5), the Blackberry OS is super-responsive – this is what I’m most pleased about – actually I’m pleased pretty much about everything on how it functions. The phone functionality works great, and you can easily navigate around while you talk (it displays your on-call time in the top bar while you access other apps) and it runs things in the background without any problems (I’m looking at your Palm OS 5). I’ll be posting more about the UI later – there are a lot of nice things about it. The overall responsive-ness is amazing though
• Sure, I wish the camera performed better in low-light and was higher-res, but overall it’s quite serviceable. I haven’t found a good dedicated client yet, but the email-sending is streamlined enough that I may even start posting to Flickr again.

Now, the Media Player has been getting some guff (yes, it could really be much better, and I hope that future revs are), however, it seems to be perfectly serviceable. It’ll play music in the background, and the video actually plays quite well if you transcode correctly (the player-controls stay onscreen though).

The original mencoder options were posted on this Blackberry Forums thread. I’ve maded some of my own tweaks:

mencoder -vf scale=240:-2 -o -of avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=320:acodec=mp3:abitrate=64

Using scale=240:-2 scale=240:180 will have mencoder retain your existing aspect ratio instead of forcing a 4:3. I also upped the bitrate a bit (why not splurge). I haven’t played w/ faac for audio yet, but will be trying that next.