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Review: Blackberry Pearl

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Up until now the Blackberry has been a
bit more cumbersome than most mobile phones and aimed more at the
enterprise user than the humble consumer. But the Research in Motion
(RIM) could change all that with its Pearl .

Aimed at a far wider market than just
posing executives, the phone is quite light, weighing in at around 89
grams and the colour screen is large enough and pleasant enough to be
usable.

We tested its call quality quite
extensively. Taking it on a trip down to St. Ives in Cornwall, calls
were perfect quality and we didn't notice any calls being dropped
while traveling on the motorway, or indeed in the middle of the
Cornish countryside.

Navigating around the phone's features
is done mainly via its trackball just below the display that gives
the Pearl its name. We found this to be better the pretty much all
other phones as a means of navigating through functions.

While other Blackberry's have a full
keyboard, this device, because of its size, has to compromise and has
Qwerty keyboard squeezed into 20 keys by fitting two letters per key.
To get figure out what you are typing it uses its brand of predictive
texting called "SureType". This works quite well in use and
running up a short email is not an arduous task. But I did can the
idea of trying to write this review using the keypad.

Sending and receiving emails is the
major part of this phone. It is just plainly great and if sending
emails on a phone is what your want to do, then I can thoroughly
recommend this for that task.

Browsing the internet is not too bad
either. The browser application tends to strip out most of the pretty
graphics on a web page and shows mostly just the text. It downloads
reasonably fast but it isn't broadband speed. It does make a good
stab at presenting this site, but manages to strip out our ads (guys
we have to make this site pay for itself!) But if you want
information without most of the guff then its the one for you.

photo-taken-with-pearl.jpgOther functions like the 1.3 Megapixel
camera give mixed results. It also comes with Yahoo Messenger , Google
Talk
and RIM's own BlackBerry Messenger.It also has 64MB of flash
storage and Bluetooth.

My one bugbear is the battery life. I
have been having to recharge this phone on a daily basis, it wouldn't
be so bad if I could blame that on it being a 3G phone, but it isn't.
It is a humble 2.5G phone.

Overall, an almost perfect phone (until
the iPhone is available to the public) which could do with better
battery life.

Overall rating: 8/10