5-Min Review: Blackberry Pearl

Now if you've read my past rants you'll know that I'm not big on convergence devices for my personal use. Work however sometimes demands you make hard choices and for me in 2007, that choice was to either use a NeXtel BB or my own. I opted to buy my own and in the end that was Pearl. I've used the Pearl as my work phone for about a month now and though there's some aspects to the design that I think need work, for what I use it for it's been okay.

Let's face it the BB Pearl tries to shrink the form factor of previous models to that of a candybar phone and while the size is about right (easier to hold in my hand for long periods than my Samsung t509) it does bring with it several draw backs. The most obvious is that the screen is reduced, making reading long emails a bit of a chore. The reduced keyboard also makes thumbing a little more challenging. On the upside though I don't use my Pearl for outbound. It's about 80% inbound with the replies being often one or two lines tops. Detailed emails of a technical nature still require me to crack open my laptop.

Battery life has been OK, but in truth I've gotten most of my client base to realize that technical questions really should be going through my email since it gives me a good history of when the issues were reported and I can trace the conversation for details. Call quality is moderate though sometimes I think the normal headset volume falters. The speaker phone though is quite loud and very handy for conference calls.

Overall I think the Pearl can be helpful for folks who need notifications and integration with corporate network (Calendar, contacts etc) however for Joe Average the Pearl is just a glorified geek-badge :P