Blackberry Pearl By Jake on Sep 09, 2007 - Updated Sep 18, 2011

The Pearl is a mid-size smart phone with a nice form factor and good outer apperance. Much more slender than the rest of the often swollen Blackberry family I find this hardware packaging very attractive. It features the normal set of phone associated features and comes with the famous RIM/Blackberry mobile email package that promises to connect you to your email stream on the go.

Trackwheel - First of all the trackwheel feels great and is very responsive at first touch. Yet it proved to be a sensitive piece of technology for me who at times carry the phone in my pockets or bag. After only 2 months of service the trackwheel was practically useless.

E-mail - I primarly use web based email, Hotmail & Gmail. I still have not been able to route my hotmails to my blackberry. But Gmail went fine, though for some reason all settings disappeared a few days later.

Some minor drawbacks I experienced was trying to move my SIM card contacts from my first Pearl phone to the new (I got a replacement for the malfunctioning trackwheel). I first had to manually copy all contacts from phone memory to SIM memory and then clone them to the new phone. This could not be done in a batch processing style of interaction which I think is a weak point.

All in all I am only partially happy with this buy.