Blackberry Pearl With T Mobile Software By reann on Sep 14, 2007 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

I am brand new to the blackberry family or any type of smart phone and decided to try this out as I was working for the cellular service provider. The phone has a nice sleek black with dark gray sides and easily fits in the palm of your hand. For a person with larger or chubbier fingers, it may not be as easy to punch the keyboard. It is a QWERTY keyboard with each key sharing two letters and/or numbers. Switching from texting with a standard phone using the 10-key style was a bit confusing at first as my brain retrained itself to think like a computer keyboard and not pressing 1-10 to create the alphabet. Suretype is Blackberry's auto-fill texting. I love this making it easy and quick to reply to e-mails, instant messages, and text messages. For scrolling, Blackberry introduced their new trackball that looks like a pearl, hence the name, which is extremely addicting to scroll through everything. When surfing the internet, it made it fast to just keep moving the trackball down instead of having to press physically into the keypad as with most phones. The camera takes very good quality images in comparision to other camera phones. The memory is low (64mg) but you can purchase either a 1gig or 2gig card to expand it. I do see why people have referred to them as "crackberry".

The T-Mobile installed software and programming. The version that came with the phone gave the interface different options on how to display icons but it had a bug where when receiving or making calls, the first few seconds no one would hear me. Since T-Mobile has their "Myfaves" program, it caused anyone I had as a myfaves contact to not play a ringtone I specified for them. I had to call the company three times until someone finally told me how to make it work. Pain in the neck. Also had to download the newest version of their software which did fix the mute problem and made other things faster but it deleted the game that originally came with the phone.

I would still suggest it to anyone that needs/wants to e-mail or text on the go easily.