The BlackBerry Pearl, all I've ever wanted in a phone
I remember the days of my Nokia 2160, when it was exciting that I was able to send text messages from my phone to another phone. It was the first digital phone on the market and none of my friends had cell phones back then so being able to text message was cool but useless since I had nobody to text. Back then it was good just for looking cool and being used as an actual phone. Then they started to add cameras, video, video games and other features to cell phones they were adding a lot of crap that really never worked great. Sure Snake on the Nokia 6160 was a great time waster, but very few interesting pictures have been taken with camera phones, and the N-Gage video game phone was a bust.
What did work though was email when Canada's Research In Motion released the BlackBerry devices. At first they were like pagers, stand-alone devices just for email, but as time went on they became phones as well. First they were large things, but now they've started to slim down and with the release of the Pearl they've finally gotten to a point where they have mass market appeal, and a camera.
I've always liked BlackBerry. Their phones work, really well and the ability to send and recieve email from a small device on my hip is much more useful than I would have assumed. Now with a camera I can photo blog, and post from the go. I had that ability with previous phones, blogging with my BlackBerry is something I've done for years now, but this is the first time I've had a phone with both a decent camera and a good way to type. As a Vancouver based blogger I was given a Nokia 6682 to use and while I liked the camera trying to type on it was such a pain in the ass that I gave up. However the Sure Type on the BlackBerry Pearl is so easy to use that I'm back to blogging on the go, and uploading my pictures directly to Flickr.
The Pearl is also the first BlackBerry that's really good looking. Before people would look at my BlackBerry (I've had a 7280, 7290, 8700 and 7130) and wince. They might be able to understand how it could be useful, but it never had the visual appeal to interest someone who might otherwise be looking at a Motorola Razr or similiar flashy but useless piece of garbage. The Pearl though is sexy, slender and the sort of phone that makes people want to touch it, play with it and then own it.
The camera is pretty good, a 1.3 megapixel affair, but doesn't really handle low light conditions too well. With third party software it works well with both my iMac G5 and my Macbook. Adding a memory card allows the phone to show up on the desktop like an external drive and I've been able to load both AAC and MP3 files into its music player. I've yet to be able to figure out how to encode video to play on the device, and so I can't say how well that works. Truth be told I won't be using the music player much. It's nice to be able to use my music as ringtones, but I still perfer the ease of using my iPod to the still some what clunky audio player interface. Plus I listen to a lot of Podcasts and the nice thing about the iPod is that it can remember where I was while listening to the Podcast so that if I have to stop and then start later on I won't have to re-listen to a portion, something the Pearl and no other (non-iTunes) music phone is able to do yet.
All in all the Pearl is the best phone I've seen yet. I still would perfer a full keyboard as opposed to having to trust the phone's keystroke recognition software, but that would make the phone bigger. I don't actually mind the bigger phones like the 8700, but a nice small one is really cool. The Pearl is the best phone out on the market for my needs (which includes mobile blogging, email and of course talking). It would be nice if it featured Wi-Fi and the ability to do VoIP calling but those are things that have never really been well intergraded into a cellular phone so their omission is not a big deal.
Note: With the exception of the top picture (of the Pearl itself) all of the photos that are included in this post were taken with my BlackBerry Pearl's built in camera.
Comments
Having used Palms, like the Tungsten T, I really don't like a pen input. Also touchscreens are way easier to break which on cell phones is a pain. I do like the SE phones though, I always wanted to get a P800 back in the day.