Pros: Lightweight, attractive, works well, feature packed
Cons: Weak battery life and screen smudges easily
The bottom line: The Blackberry Pearl is as good as it gets in the smart phone arena. At least until later this year.
The Blackberry Pearl is the coolest phone around - at least until the Apple iPhone comes out later this year. The Pearl is small, sleek, easy to use, fun, and works great! Aside from that, it's a Blackberry, so it does a great job with email.

About one-half the size of the Blackberry 7100, the Pearl incorporates a high-resolution LCD screen (with over 65K colors), trackball navigation (the trackball IS the Pearl), a 1.3 megapixel digital camera with flash, a smart keyboard with two letters for each key, Bluetooth, and lots of built-in applications, like email, text messaging, address book, calendar, memo, task manager, browser, mapping, alarms, search, and more. You can play videos, listen to music, and essentially do anything you could do on a much larger phone, all in a 3.1 ounce package that is powered by a 312Mhz Intel XScale processor. So, it's light and fast.

Nice phone

The phone is not just an afterthought on the Blackberry Pearl. It’s much better than some of its predecessors, which were really email devices with phone capabilities kind of thrown in. The Pearl includes an integrated speakerphone, Bluetooth for hands-free dialing, voice dialing capabilities (at least with my Cingular plan), conference calling, call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, voice mail, and a nifty integration with the address book that makes it easy to search for names while in the phone application. You simply start typing the person’s name and their name appears along with their phone numbers. Use the track ball to select the right phone number and the phone call is made. Voice quality is excellent and reception is very good as well.

Email

Of course, email is the heart of this device. Using either Blackberry Enterprise Server (for corporate email) or Blackberry Internet Service (for personal mail), receiving mail is easy and automatic. Address book updates are also automatic. Integration with my Outlook application on my computer is nearly instantaneous. When I get an email on my Blackberry, I inevitably receive it a minute or so later on my PC. My calendar is also updated automatically, allowing me to view appointments from anywhere. This is the only time that the smaller screen of the Pearl comes into play, as I have to scroll to view more than one or two appointments in a day.

Composing email is easy, using the keyboard. Two letters per key takes some getting used to, but for the most part it works very well. Simply type the words as you would normally and don’t pay attention to the words until your message is done. Usually, the Pearl performs flawlessly. Occasionally, you will have to go back to a word and manually correct it. But the process is intuitive and easy to do. And this inconvenience is worth it for the small size and lightweight of this smartphone.

Blackberry’s peerless email system also lets you view attachments in all Microsoft Office formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) as well as PDF files, text files and even pictures.

You can personalize notifications for both phone calls and email messages using either ringtones, vibrations, LED flashes or even onscreen notification. I have chosen to use vibrate for both modes, which means that I sometimes am not sure if my phone is ringing or if I have received an email. The longer it vibrates, the more likely that my phone is ringing.

Another nice feature is the fact that the email icon has a little jagged circle around it when I get new messages. So even if I didn’t notice that the phone vibrated, I could see at a glance that there were new messages since I last checked.

Also, the screen shows unread messages and number of voice mails at a glance at the top of the screen. The application screen is another nice feature of the Pearl. Using the trackball, you can move between applications. The application name appears at the bottom of the screen. If you are interested in using that application, simply click on it by pushing the trackball to start the application. It’s all very intuitive, as is the return key and the menu key on either side of the trackball and the make a call (green) and hang up (red) phone buttons next to those buttons.

It’s Not Perfect

The Blackberry Pearl is not flawless. Battery life is much worse than on my previous Blackberry (the 7100), and the screen gets smudged very easily. Blackberry doesn’t offer any good cases for the Pearl, so I’m going to have to live with the screen issue. The battery life is annoying, as it starts to run down fairly early in the day. So, I have a charger in my car, as well as one at home.

Conclusion

These are minor annoyances. With its myriad of excellent features, great performance, lightweight, cool design and state-of-the-art Blackberry email integration, the Blackberry Pearl is the best smart phone around – at least until the Apple iPhone comes out.

Included with phone
USB cable
handsfree headset
AC adapter
Lithium-ion battery
CD-ROM with desktop software
Getting started guide

Specifications
Talk-time – 15 hours
Dimensions – 4.2 inches long by 1.96 wide by 0.57 deep
Weight – 3.1 ounces
64MB flash memory
1.3 megapixel digital camera with flash
LCD screen – 240 x 260 pixels, over 65K colors
312 MHz Intel XScale processor


Copyright 2007 Jordango