BlackBerry 8100 Pearl Review

September 26th, 2006

As I mentioned in my previous post about the Nokia E60, I’m typically not a fan of full QWERTY keyboards on phones, and generally didn’t like my first experience with BlackBerry. Even so, I was compelled to give the new BlackBerry Pearl a shot since the form factor is so damn sexy. As thin as a Motorola RAZR, light as a feather and sporting a trackball a la Mighty Mouse – the Pearl offered much promise.

I picked up my BB Pearl on the day it was released by T-Mobile while in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. My buddy Will year of getting to know us the dvd download freshman the dvdrip lloyd divx recommended it to me the other night and since he is such a phone maven I had to oblige him in giving it a test run.

I was generally very pleased with the interface. Though just like other BlackBerrys, the Pearl’s screen is quite vibrant and the colors seem much more natural and bright. It sports a surprisingly good camera with flash watch point of no return in divx . The kicker though, is the multi-directional scrolling ability due to the trackball that resembles the one used by Apple’s Mighty Mouse. Surprisingly, I’ve been able to teach myself to type decently well with my thumbs, QWERTY-style, in roughly 2 weeks. My favorite application for the BB is Google Maps, which also shows real-time traffic, but I’m not sure how often this is updated since I’ve found the traffic to be off several times. If you like Blackberrys, you’ll probably love this model because it incorporates the best elements of what traditionally keeps people hooked on RIM’s products, yet does away with the bulky form factor and sometimes undesirable side-scroll wheel.

I’m neutral on the Pearl’s battery life; a full charge typically lasts a day to a day and a half. Consider that I use my mobile as my primary phone (no home phone) and I talk a lot, though. Frustratingly, the provided USB cable won’t be able to charge your BlackBerry 8100 unless you have Blackberry Desktop Software installed, and there isn’t a version for Mac! Also, I still am not a big fan of the OS, which is counterintuitive in some respects and has some limitations. By far my biggest complaints have been that there isn’t Mac support yet, and that there are some basic arrangements that just don’t make sense, such as SMS messages being mixed among emails (something that I’m told can be fixed with a hack). Another complaint I have is that if the phone is on ring, and someone calls, the ring (and vibrate) is silenced immediately with the slightest move of the trackball – this sucks if the phone is in your pocket. I’ve missed a few calls due to this reason and I’m hoping, and assuming, that RIM will provide a fix soon. Lastly, if you don’t have a BlackBerry Exchange Server you’ll have to rely on a service such as T-Mobile’s BlackBerry service ($20/month) to relay your emails to your mobile phone. However, even IMAP email won’t be synced between your desktop computer and your mobile phone. Thus, you’ll have quite a large number of unread emails on your device and you’ll either have to go through and clear them out manually or just leave them there (as I do). It’s an annoyance that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

To address the issue of not being able to sync data between a Mac and the Pearl yet, Will provided this link to me: Pocketmac 4 Beta (supports Blackberry 8700 and 8100 Pearl) it looks like RIM has pulled the Beta, hopefully this means they’re close to releasing Pocketmac 4. Upon trying it I was happy to see that my iCal events were transferred without problem, but I’m unable to migrate specific contact lists to the BB, so I end up with all 1500 contact on my mobile phone (which is quite a pain). Pocketmac4 also provides the ability to sync safari bookmarks, notes, tasks and a few other basics, along with being able to backup data to a .mac account.

In the end, the Pearl is decidedly good enough based on its form factor to tide me over till the release of the next Treo

, but leaves me wanting in terms of compatibility with my desktop machine.

Update 9/28/06: I just found out that you can tether your BlackBerry Pearl to your laptop for a wireless internet connection anywhere you have mobile service. This page describes how to configure your Powerbook to use your Pearl’s data connection to access the web. I just set mine up to utilize T-Mobile’s data network in about 10 minutes. So far the result is download speeds of approximately 200kbps and upload speed of (a paltry) 7kbps, which is just fine for checking email and accessing pages in a crunch while you’re away from your normal access points. My BlackBerry 8100 just became a whole lot more useful!

Update 10/09/06: In about a month of using the 8100 I’ve come to like it very much. However, just today my trackball began to malfunction. I’ve had an Apple Mighty Mouse for over a year and it has only had trouble with the trackball once. This is easily remedied by applying a small amount of waterless hand sanatizer to the trackball and working it around a little to dissolve any finger grease or pocket fuzz. I imagine that many people will have this problem down the road.

Entry Filed under: Gear