The Blackberry Pearl: An Unbiased Review

The Blackberry Pearl is one of the most popular Blackberrys aimed at the consumer market. I have owned and used my Pearl for about a year and I have a love/hate relationship with it. Below is my unbiased review of my Blackberry Pearl including the benefits and drawbacks of this Smart Phone.

First, as a phone, the Blackberry Pearl excels. Its call clarity is terrific and it has as close to land line clarity that I have ever experienced in a cell phone. I very seldom lose a call. The contact list is intuitive and it is very easy to add or edit a contact. There is also voice dialing which works pretty well. The phone correctly dials the contact that I speak approximately 90% of the time.

The Pearl does not have a full keyboard. Instead each button has two letters or numbers on it. Blackberry calls the input technology for this phone "Sure Type." To type, you press the button that has the letter you want. As you continue to type the word, the Pearl tries to determine the word that you are typing. As you get closer to finishing the word a list of possibilities appears. You can either finish typing the word or you can pick one of the Pearl's guesses.

I HATED Sure Type when I first started using it. Then, as time progressed, I started to become more comfortable with it until I came to the point that I actually liked it a lot. One of the benefits of Sure Type and having two letters per button is that Blackberry was able to make the phone much smaller than a typical Blackberry. This is a great benefit and once you get the hang of Sure Type I think you will like it as much as I do.

The Pearl also handles regular text messaging (SMS) as well as multimedia messaging (MMS) for pictures and videos. Texting on the Pearl is not a problem and intuitive.

Of course, the biggest feature of the Blackberry is access to email. I do not have my corporate email account on my Blackberry. Instead I have my Hotmail and Gmail coming into the phone. Setting up these accounts is easy and fairly hassle free. The Blackberry takes you through the steps and within about 5 minutes you will be up and running. I notice that the emails come to my Blackberry about 2 minutes after they arrive in my actual email account on my computer. For some people this is a problem, but for a casual user like me this short delay is manageable.

One of the major drawbacks of the Pearl, and all Blackberrys for that matter, is the small amount of applications, especially compared to Apple's iPhone. The Blackberry App Store is tiny compared to Apple's. Hopefully this will change in the near future, but in the meantime I admit that I do have some iPhone envy when it comes to apps.

Another drawback of the Pearl in my opinion is the unreliability of the battery. Battery life can vary greatly. Of course with heavy use the battery will drain quickly, but on days when I do not use it much the battery life is very inconsistent. Sometimes it will last a few days without much use, and other times it drains within a few hours.

All in all, if you are looking for a compact Smart Phone with great access to email and awesome call clarity, the Blackberry Pearl may be an option for you. Although it lacks a vast library of apps it makes it up in its small size and overall functionality, especially email. If you can get comfortable with the Sure Type input technology then there is a good chance you will be very happy owning a Pearl.