What?

I have been testing a Blackberry 8800 for work and installed the GMAIL client. This was the message I received:

For anyone who can’t see it the message is:
The application gm_8700_v4_0_L1 is attempting to access phone logs. Would you like to allow access?

A couple of notes:
1) Google detected this phone as an 8700 but the application works fine.
2) GMAIL seems to function properly if I click no.

So my questions are:
1) Why does Google want or need access to my phone logs?
2) Has it always done this and I only recently found out due to my 8800 prompting me?

To say the least this makes me very nervous and so far the only purpose I can see for this is to allow me to dial a number from inside an email but why wouldn’t it ask me when I attempted to dial rather than after I open the application?

Update: Searching through the settings shows no option to disable this.

I doubt anything of any value to anyone will ever be here…