Always a sucker to buy the latest and greatest gadget without much personal justification, I’ve bought the new Blackberry Pearl 8100. There is a consolation that I have it on a 30 day trial from T-Mobile, so if I don’t get on with it very well, I can always revert to my trusted 8700g later on in February.

So far, so good though. I really like this phone. I went with the 8100 as I wanted to get a camera so I could blog via email with images and I also wanted something smaller and thinner – more phone like I guess.

The phone is performing well, I set it up pretty quickly with personal and enterprise mail and the speed of the phone seems just fine. The software included with the Pearl lets you backup your important stuff from your old Blackberry to transfer to the new.

The biggest adjustment is moving away from a full QWERTY keyboard to the Blackberry Suretype, predictive typing where you have two letters per key. I’ve found already that if you try and concentrate and deliberately try to press the correct keys, you can misspell and make errors. If you don’t think about it too much and pretend there is a full QWERTY keyboard there and type as you would normally, then things seem to work well. Make sense? No?!

It has Blackberry Maps, but I’ve already superseded that by downloading Google Maps for Mobile, which is much better.

Pet hates so far, (which I hope I’ll just get used to over time):

• the shortcut keys have changed. I miss the “C” to compose new mail, “M” to go to messages, “K” to lock the keyboard etc
• as our IT department has strict password policies, I have to have a complicated password to unlock my device, and doing that via the predictive texting is cumbersome
• the screen is obviously less wide than the traditional Blackberry, but I’m getting used to it. The browser has an interesting preview function where you can see a mini representation of a web page and scroll around in that and zoom into the piece you want to see in greater detail
• The Pearl doesn’t come with a holster, which I miss

Positives include:

• the camera – even though the lens is only a 1.3 megapixel the images produced seem to be of a good quality. You can then attach these images to a MMS or an email and send to your friends! The built in flash and digital zoom (5x) works incredibly well. If you want to send photos via email, your Blackberry Enterprise Server has to be v4.1 SP2 or higher
• self taught predictive text – I’ve seen some dumb predictive text in my time, but the Blackberry not only learns from you to compile extra words, but it also looks at web pages you visit, contacts you have and emails sent to you to look for words not in the standard dictionary – clever
• voice activated dialing (VAD) works really well
• the Pearl control button – this makes things very easy to navigate, however I still find my thumb moving down to the right side of the phone looking for a track wheel!
• room for a microSD card – the strange thing is that this is buried below the battery, so it’s not like this can be removed/replaced easily
• Multi-media player seems OK, but I haven’t tried that much yet

This page will be a work-in-progress as I find out more.