Digital Trends

BlackBerry Pearl

January 1st, 2007 | by Stewart Wolpin

Features and Design Cont'd

Pearl's primary input method is its SureType QWERTY keypad, laid across 20 buttons (usually with two letters), punctuation or action keys (i.e. shift, alt, return, delete, etc.) per key, in a four-by-five key array. The 10 two-tone numeric keys are centered in this key field array.

While Pearl's individual rectangular keys are approximately the same size as the BlackBerry 8700's square buttons, the Pearl keypad is so packed that accidental adjacent key hits are far more common, especially if your thumbs are bigger than dainty. And the single, all-black, vertical rows of keys bracketing the white-black alphanumeric keys, combined with the multi-characters-per-key layout, is disconcerting to say the least and really slows down typing, as does the necessity of two-thumbing words with consecutive letters that are on the same key, such as words with "er" or "as," both common combinations.

Above the keypad are four function keys — send, menu, back, and end — with a "trackball" controller, which is not really a trackball at all (it doesn't move), but more like a joy nipple. You simply rub your thumb over it to move the cursor up, down, left, and right. It's quite sensitive and takes a bit of practice to get precise results. Once we got used to it we were able to control it easily, but we still missed BlackBerry's familiar spine jog shuttle wheel, with its tactile clicking feedback.

With no experience to draw on for multimedia functionality, it’s no small wonder that BlackBerry's music operations are so poorly implemented. Getting music into the phone is a dream, especially using Windows Media Player 11, which immediately recognizes the Pearl and lets you sync as if it were any other WMA music player (a USB data cable is included). But there is no direct music player to access on the Pearl. You have to go to the multimedia app folder and click on a folder to play the contents of that folder.

Also, Pearl offers no direct music transport keys — play, pause, and skip commands are all in a pop-up menu. And BlackBerry's "shuffle" mode plays the contents of a music folder in the same exact sequence each time.

While we could pair stereo Bluetooth headphones with the Pearl, we could not get the music to play through them; we even tried multiple other headphone models. This may be a problem with our test device rather than a systemic issue, however. But thankfully, Pearl is equipped with a standard 2.5mm headphone jack and comes with a mono wired headset. Any standard 2.5mm wired stereo headset will work fine if Bluetooth is a problem.

Like all BlackBerry phones, accessing and programming the varying ring-tone and alert options requires unnecessary digital spelunking.

For storage, Pearl includes 64MB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot, regrettably located behind the battery in a fragile metal pop-up slip.

Image Courtesy of RIM