(MONEY Magazine) – What's your favorite high-tech gadget of them all? The one you couldn't live without? These days, for me at least, the answer is easy: my new BlackBerry phone. It is, hands down, the most powerful, seamlessly designed, virtually perfect all-purpose communicator-PDA on the market.

That it's smaller than a deck of cards, weighs only 4.8 ounces and rests lightly and imperceptibly in my suit jacket pocket (freeing me from the shame of the ignominious pleather belt holster) is just the tip of the iceberg. I love being fully connected to all information all the time despite looking like the only guy at the gunfight who's not packing any heat. Did I mention that it's only 300 bucks? Sun Tzu, eat your heart out.

The BlackBerry 6200 Series handheld organizer is a PDA with always-on two-way e-mail and an integrated GSM-band world phone. Yes, it does the famous "Flying Thumbs of Fury" e-mail thing that made BlackBerry handhelds an instant hit with the digerati (and now, thankfully, you can use your existing e-mail address, whatever it may be, for your outgoing messages, instead of the default blackberry.net address some older BlackBerry models forced you to use). But there's also a very usable mobile Web browser that's surprisingly speedy and much more of a real Web tool than the starvation-diet browsers found in most newer cell phones and PDAs.

The BlackBerry's calendar and contacts automatically sync with Microsoft Outlook and other personal-organizer software on your desktop PC. And in a welcome improvement, now a simple USB cable connects the BlackBerry phone to your PC and recharges its internal lithium battery at the same time, replacing the clunky serial-connected docking cradle of BlackBerry models of old (a small travel adapter turns the supplied USB cable into an AC adapter for charging on the road). Even the battery has been improved--the old internal battery has been upgraded to a lithium battery that can be swapped easily, just like a cell phone's.

I was one of those early adopters to glom onto the original BlackBerry and see my professional life change wholesale for the better because of it, even when all it did was e-mail. And in recent years, as the manufacturer, Research in Motion (RIM), came out with newer BlackBerry models that had built-in cell phones, I've flirted with upgrading.

The cell phones in the second-generation BlackBerry devices were of good quality, but to use them you were forced to plug in one of those stupid dangling ear buds before you could answer or place a call--not a dance you need to do 30 times a day. So I stuck with the phoneless BlackBerry, waiting for RIM to really get it right.

Well, they did with the 6200 Series BlackBerry phone. It's the best cell phone I've ever used, partly because it works just like one--you hold it against your ear and yak. Sure, you may look like Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe phone, but for once, bigger is better. Instead of the incredible shrinking talk time you get with the latest sub-minis, the potent lithium battery inside the BlackBerry is good for at least twice the time you get with any cell phone. While you can use the supplied ear bud for hands-free telephony, it's not required to make or take calls, which makes this new BlackBerry the first truly user-friendly phone RIM has made to date.

What's more, the phone is fully integrated into the design and use of the rest of the BlackBerry. You don't have to quit whatever function you're working in in order to launch the phone.

It's obvious that a large team of extremely bright people with everyday telecommunication behavior like yours and mine took the unprecedented (for the gadget industry) step of actually using the BlackBerry phone on a day-to-day basis, going back to square one whenever the phone and the rest of the device didn't quite integrate, and then kept chipping away at the marble till nobody on the team had anything left to complain about. (I don't have any complaints, and complaining about gadgets is what I do for a living.)

An example: When you're thumbing out an e-mail and the phone rings, you'd expect to have to close the e-mail program, go to the main menu, launch the phone program and hope to accomplish all of this on the fly before the other party gets dumped to voice mail.

Not so with the BlackBerry. If you're doing e-mail and the phone rings, the device instantly saves the e-mail draft and switches to phone mode. It then offers you the option of answering the call or bouncing it to voice mail. If you bounce the call to voice mail, the BlackBerry automatically pulls up the e-mail you were working on. If, instead, you decide to answer the call, when it ends, your e-mail session pops right back up where you left off. You can even go back to your e-mail or look up something in your calendar in the middle of the call.

Now that's not to say that Palm and Pocket PC owners would be better off with the new BlackBerry phone. Frankly, the latest and greatest Palms and Pocket PCs are slick, and they're great PDAs. They just don't fit my particular needs and wants as the BlackBerry phone does so effortlessly.

For instance, I've never needed to jot hand-written notes onto a touch-sensitive screen and have them transform into Word documents. If you want to be able to do this, then the Palm's your best bet. Particularly the high-end jobs like the $499 Wi-Fi-enabled Tungsten C, which is my favorite Palm to date.

And I don't need Mini-Me versions of MS Office on my handheld--but if you do, then the Pocket PC is the way to go, and Hewlett-Packard's $649 iPAQ H5555 is the best of the breed.

But if, like me, you don't need scribble recognition or Microsoft mini-apps, and you'd like to carry one pocket-size device that does all your e-mail, worldwide calling and scheduling--and even stands in as a credible travel alarm when you don't feel like risking that big meeting tomorrow morning to a wake-up call from that kid with the pierced eyelids who checked you in at the front desk--no PDA on the planet comes within shouting distance of my beloved BlackBerry phone.

Now if it only came in gray...

Corey Greenberg is the technology editor of NBC's Today show.