Digital Trends

BlackBerry Pearl

January 1st, 2007 | by Stewart Wolpin

Performance and Use

As a phone, the Pearl performs like a jewel. While awkward for prose, Pearl's two-tone, backlit, numeric keypad makes dialing easier than standard QWERTY BlackBerry’s. Signal strength and volume were solid and loud at both ends, with only, "I know it's a cell phone" quality comments from co-conversationalists. Rings and vibrations were both loud and violent enough to be heard and felt from a jeans pocket.

EDGE Web access in Manhattan was fast, with pages starting to draw in five seconds and requiring another 10 seconds or so to load completely. Your network results, of course, may differ.

Pearl's 1.3 MP photos are predictably mediocre anywhere but outdoors in bright sunlight; the flash throws only a foot or so. You do get a self-portrait mirror, though.

Pearl's primary function is composing prose, and SureType, a predictive text technology, is simply not as efficient as a standard QWERTY keyboard. As you type, word choices are arraigned across a pop-up window. Hitting the space bar affirms the word choice. While test typing both mundane and ludicrous sentences, the Pearl never failed in guessing the right word. We accumulated enough trust in SureType's reliability that we stopped checking the list of guessed words, speeding up the proceedings immensely.

But SureType has problems with any name that isn't Anglo-popular. Ringo Starr was drummed out as "rungo stare" and Barbra Streisand was garbled as "barbea ateusabd." While Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton were not compromised, Mitt Romney ran as "mitt rpmnet" and Barak Obama contended as "barsk onsma." Massachusetts wasn't an issue, but Connecticut was stated as "connectiviy." Of political interest, SureType got "Jerusalem" correct, but mistranslated Damascus and Baghdad as "damsavia" and "baggdad. You get the idea. You have to switch to multi-tap not only for proper names, but when inputting an email address that's not on your contact list, and then switch back to SureType for the rest of your missive. None of this is an issue, of course, with a standard one-key/one-letter QWERTY keypad.

Rated battery life is a surprisingly short 3.5 hours for talking; the BlackBerry 8700c, with its bigger screen, goes for a rated 4 hours.