   |  | Join Date: Jul 2006 | Posts: 9,963 | Location: Topeka, KS |
RIM BlackBerry Pearl - Hot Phone !
Research In Motion (RIM) throws away its suits and ties with the Pearl, a delicious little multimedia smartphone that—surprise!—just happens to be a BlackBerry. Slimmer than a closed RAZR, it is the first BlackBerry to ship with a camera and music/video players. This little gem is guaranteed to become a winner with the young and mobile.
As thin (0.6 inches) as a closed RAZR V3m and as narrow (2 inches) as a standard candy-bar phone, the Pearl is very easy to slip into your pocket. It also looks extremely stylish, in black with chrome accents. BlackBerry partisans will immediately notice one major difference: After six years, RIM has ditched the scroll wheel in favor of a glowing trackball set right below the screen. That's a bold move, but give it a chance; I really like it. Not only is the trackball well positioned for one-handed use, you can finally move the cursor horizontally without resorting to a key combination.
berry.jpg
The 240-by-260 screen is very bright, much like the screen on the BlackBerry 7105t. Of course, something had to go to make the Pearl this tiny, and it was the keypad. Not only does the Pearl use RIM's hybrid SureType keyboard, which puts two letters on each key and relies on predictive text to guess what you meant to type, the keys are really, really small. I definitely felt more comfortable typing long e-mails on the Motorola Q or Nokia E62. But I got used to the Pearl over the course of a few days. Though I wouldn't write a full-length article on it, I could reply to e-mails without stressing.
You'll see new features as soon as you turn on the Pearl. A new home-screen theme displays your new messages and calendar items right on the main screen. But the biggest changes are the addition of a camera, music and video players, and a microSD card slot. The card is tucked under the battery, but since a USB-connected Pearl appears as a hard drive on your desktop, you probably won't be removing it much. You can store files in the 64MB of onboard memory, too, and send and receive files using Bluetooth 2.0.
A quad-band worldphone, the Pearl has strong reception and sharp, clear audio. The speakerphone is loud enough for indoor and in-car use. Transmissions, however, sounded digitally compressed on the other end, but I've been having trouble with T-Mobile reception in my area, so that may account for this problem. Background noise doesn't drown out voices.
The Pearl hooks up to Bluetooth headsets for calls, but not music. I was able to walk about 12 feet away from the phone before hearing pops and clicks. Thrillingly, this is the first BlackBerry to support voice dialing, using the excellent VoiceSignal solution, which you can trigger with a wired or Bluetooth headset. You can even use your own MP3s as ringtones. Battery life was good as well, at about 8 hours 30 minutes of call time.
The camera, music, and video players are all of startlingly high quality, but they each lack one or two key features. (Corporate users shouldn't freak out about the new media features. BlackBerry Enterprise Server owners can lock out any of these options.) The 1.3-megapixel camera, with a little flash and a self-portrait mirror, takes strikingly sharp pictures with excellent color balance outdoors, though I did see some annoying JPEG artifacting. Indoors, color noise becomes quite noticeable. You can change the white balance and compression rate, but there are no burst, macro, or video modes. The Pearl's music player handles MP3, AAC, and WAV audio files, and it even shows album art. But you can't search by album, artist, or title, though you can organize songs in folders and play the contents of a folder. Videos look absolutely terrific at 24 frames per second, but the video player has no full-screen mode, and you can only navigate through long files in increments of three minutes.
Unfortunately, RIM's desktop suite handles multimedia rather clumsily. For example, there's no way to easily reformat songs, videos, or pictures for optimal display or playback on the phone. In fact, all that the poorly named Media Manager application essentially does is let you move files into the internal memory. Though the Pearl supports popular music and image formats, re-encoding video for the phone requires an unfortunate amount of geekery.— Next: Business as Usual
here are some more pictures..
RIM Blackberry Pearl
As thin (0.6 inches) as a closed RAZR V3m and as narrow (2 inches) as a standard candy-bar phone, the Pearl is very easy to slip into your pocket. It also looks extremely stylish, in black with chrome accents. BlackBerry partisans will immediately notice one major difference: After six years, RIM has ditched the scroll wheel in favor of a glowing trackball set right below the screen. That's a bold move, but give it a chance; I really like it. Not only is the trackball well positioned for one-handed use, you can finally move the cursor horizontally without resorting to a key combination.
berry.jpg
The 240-by-260 screen is very bright, much like the screen on the BlackBerry 7105t. Of course, something had to go to make the Pearl this tiny, and it was the keypad. Not only does the Pearl use RIM's hybrid SureType keyboard, which puts two letters on each key and relies on predictive text to guess what you meant to type, the keys are really, really small. I definitely felt more comfortable typing long e-mails on the Motorola Q or Nokia E62. But I got used to the Pearl over the course of a few days. Though I wouldn't write a full-length article on it, I could reply to e-mails without stressing.
You'll see new features as soon as you turn on the Pearl. A new home-screen theme displays your new messages and calendar items right on the main screen. But the biggest changes are the addition of a camera, music and video players, and a microSD card slot. The card is tucked under the battery, but since a USB-connected Pearl appears as a hard drive on your desktop, you probably won't be removing it much. You can store files in the 64MB of onboard memory, too, and send and receive files using Bluetooth 2.0.
A quad-band worldphone, the Pearl has strong reception and sharp, clear audio. The speakerphone is loud enough for indoor and in-car use. Transmissions, however, sounded digitally compressed on the other end, but I've been having trouble with T-Mobile reception in my area, so that may account for this problem. Background noise doesn't drown out voices.
The Pearl hooks up to Bluetooth headsets for calls, but not music. I was able to walk about 12 feet away from the phone before hearing pops and clicks. Thrillingly, this is the first BlackBerry to support voice dialing, using the excellent VoiceSignal solution, which you can trigger with a wired or Bluetooth headset. You can even use your own MP3s as ringtones. Battery life was good as well, at about 8 hours 30 minutes of call time.
The camera, music, and video players are all of startlingly high quality, but they each lack one or two key features. (Corporate users shouldn't freak out about the new media features. BlackBerry Enterprise Server owners can lock out any of these options.) The 1.3-megapixel camera, with a little flash and a self-portrait mirror, takes strikingly sharp pictures with excellent color balance outdoors, though I did see some annoying JPEG artifacting. Indoors, color noise becomes quite noticeable. You can change the white balance and compression rate, but there are no burst, macro, or video modes. The Pearl's music player handles MP3, AAC, and WAV audio files, and it even shows album art. But you can't search by album, artist, or title, though you can organize songs in folders and play the contents of a folder. Videos look absolutely terrific at 24 frames per second, but the video player has no full-screen mode, and you can only navigate through long files in increments of three minutes.
Unfortunately, RIM's desktop suite handles multimedia rather clumsily. For example, there's no way to easily reformat songs, videos, or pictures for optimal display or playback on the phone. In fact, all that the poorly named Media Manager application essentially does is let you move files into the internal memory. Though the Pearl supports popular music and image formats, re-encoding video for the phone requires an unfortunate amount of geekery.— Next: Business as Usual
here are some more pictures..
RIM Blackberry Pearl
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Last edited by Brandon; 11-15-2006 at 08:18 AM.
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