10 Months with a Blackberry Pearl (8100)

I've been carrying Blackberries for several years now, and although I love the convenience and productivity that the devices provide, I always hated carrying a brick on my belt. When RIM announced the Pearl (also known as the 8100) in 2006, I was immediately interested, and after playing with one at my local T-Mobile store, I was hooked. I didn't buy one immediately, however--I waited until my contract was up and got a smoking deal on a new Pearl back in January 2007 ($50 after rebates, credits, etc).

Since that time, I have been really pleased with my Pearl. The device combines an extremely attactive size and weight with high functionality and usability. It has all of the features that I've always wanted in a Blackberry:

• Traditional cell phone size and weight: 4.2" long, 2" wide, .5" deep; 3 ounces



• Quad-band GSM coverage (works in 100+ countries) and EDGE data connectivity. Coverage on the T-Mobile network has been very good in my experience, and I've used it all over the US.



• Beautiful color screen



• Polyphonic ring tones, includng the ability to use MP3 songs as ringtones



• Bluetooth headset support



• Full support for Blackberry Enterprise Servers (BES)



• Trackball (provides x and y navigation)



• Audio and video playback, including the ability for phone calls to pause and restart music playback



• Camera: 1 megapixel camera, including a small flash



• Voice dialing: surprisingly accurate voice dialing feature makes placing calls without looking at the keyboard much easier



• Memory expansion (up to 2GB via flash chip)



• Customizable ringer profiles (you can assign custom ringers to different people)



• Good battery life: 15 days standby, 3.5 hours talk time

Those are the strong points of the unit. As you might guess, there are a few things I don't like about the Pearl:

• Battery life: the unit is 10 months old, and the battery rarely lasts more than 2 days on standby and 2 hours of talk time. I suppose this is to be expected, but buying a new battery every year is a pain.



• Lack of stereo Bluetooth support: the unit does not support the Bluetooth profiles that allow the new crop of wireless stereo headsets to work. Rumors have it that RIM will be adding support in a future release of the operating system.



• Proprietary headset jack: even though RIM provides a stereo headset (two earbuds with a microphone), the quality of sound reproduction is awful. Unfortunately, you can't just plug in any headset--the Pearl's headset jack is a proprietary 2.5mm design, which means that you have to buy an adapter.



• Keyboard: in order to fit all of the keys required into the small form factor of the Pearl, RIM developed a system called "Suretype" which allowed them to double up most keys (for example, both the A and the S are on a single key). The Pearl intelligently guesses which word you are typing--for example, if you type 'hello', you actually press a single key for each letter (GH-ER-L-L-OP keys), and the phone figures out which word you mean. In practice, this system works pretty well, but it's still no substitute for a full keyboard.



• Camera: I'd actually prefer not to have a camera on the phone, as certain companies and government installations will not permit camera phones on premise.



• Memory: it would be great to be able to put more than 2GB into the phone; since it can play movies, you can use up that amount of storage pretty quickly.



• EDGE: while EDGE data rates are much better than the old GPRS system, it's still painfully slow. Support for the new UMTS standard would provide close to broadband speeds (although carriers in the US are very slowly adopting UMTS, so it's probably a moot point unless you live in a country that has support).



• Web browsing: even with a "real" browser installed (I've been using Opera Mini), browsing the web is still a painful experience. This is due in part to slow EDGE data rates and also because of the lack of support for things like Java. The built-in Blackberry browser is OK, but I seem to have a lot of problems with timeouts when I'm using it.

In summary, I'm definitely pleased with my Pearl, and I would highly recommend it to anyone that wants the functionality of a Blackberry with the convenience and size of a regular cell phone. I have tried some of the newer, slimmer, full keyboard models (like the Curve), and I actually prefer the Pearl's keyboard--the newer units have such small keys that I think they're really hard to use (I have big fingers!). Nice job, RIM--keep up the good work!