RIM BlackBerry Pearl

The RIM BlackBerry Pearl is the first BlackBerry to offer a 1.3-megapixel camera, music and video playback, expandable memory, and a mapping application. The super sleek phone also continues to offer superior push e-mail capabilities, EDGE support, and Bluetooth. It has a 2.25-inch TFT screen that displays 65,000 colors at a 240×260-pixel resolution, offers a sharp, clear display with vibrant colors and is great for viewing e-mail, images, and Web sites

It also features light-sensing technology, so it will automatically adjust the screen and keyboard depending on your environment; true enough, it adjusted the display’s light so that we could still read it in direct sunlight. You can change the screen’s theme; backlight time; and font size, style, and family. A small LED above the screen illuminates different colors for different status messages: green for wireless, blue for Bluetooth, red for new messages, and amber for low battery. There’s also a mute button on top of the device.

The BlackBerry Pearl sports a 1.3-megapixel camera with a flash and 5X zoom; however, it doesn’t have video recording capabilities like most camera-equipped smart phones and cell phones. You also don’t get as many of the customization options, but you can choose from three picture sizes (1,280×1, 024, 640×480, and 320×240) and three quality settings (normal, fine, and superfine). The BlackBerry Pearl’s 1.3-megapixel camera took decent pictures, though colors were a bit washed out. You can’t record video, but you can watch video with the integrated media player. It supports various video formats, including AVI, MP4, MOV, and 3GP files. For music, the BlackBerry Pearl supports MP3, AAC, MIDI, and WAV files, among others. Beyond multimedia, Black Berry Maps provides local maps and allows you to get text-based driving directions right on your device, but there are no integrated GPS capabilities (you can add this functionality with a Bluetooth GPS receiver.

BlackBerry Pearl retains many of the same features that have made Blackberry’s popular, such as e-mail. The smart phone can sync with your company’s BlackBerry Enterprise server with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise to deliver corporate e-mail in real time. It also supports up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts. There’s a setup wizard onboard to help with this process, and we used it to get our AT&T Yahoo account set up on the device.Other messaging options include text and multimedia messages, and we’re glad to see the inclusion of popular instant-messaging clients, such as Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and ICQ. For mobile professionals, an attachment viewer opens popular file formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG, GIF, and more.

You can also view tracked changes and embedded images and zoom and rotate documents, but you can’t edit documents out of the box, though third-party software is available that allows this functionality. Other applications on the Pearl include a calendar, a Web browser, a tasks list, a memo pad, an alarm, a password keeper, and a calculator.

As a phone, the address book is limited only by the available memory, which tops out at 64MB flash memory (the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts). For each entry, you can store up to eight numbers, work and home addresses, e-mail and Web addresses, company information, and notes. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo to a contact as well as a group category, business or personal. The BlackBerry Pearl now supports voice dialing, so you can use voice commands to call up contacts and dial numbers.

In addition, Bluetooth 2.0 is onboard for wireless headsets, car kits, and desktop connectivity. Though RIM has said it plans to add Wi-Fi to future devices, the Pearl does not have integrated Wi-Fi. Fortunately, you can surf the Web using T-Mobile’s EDGE network. The BlackBerry Pearl is rated for 3.5 hours of talk time and up to 15 days of standby time. In our tests, we were able to get 5.8 hours of talk time. RIM also says the Pearl’s battery can last up to 21 hours with just music playback and 6 hours for video playback. Though nothing revolutionary, the addition of multimedia features and the already solid e-mail capabilities make the RIM BlackBerry Pearl an attractive device for business users and consumers alike.