Last week I decided its time to get a new phone. I’ve always had just a “phone”. You couldn’t do anything more with it than dial numbers and talk to people (although my last phone, the Motorola V300 did have a camera). This time I went all out. I didn’t get just a phone. I got a miniature laptop that fits on my hip.
I now have a Blackberry Pearl smartphone, the latest and greatest in mobile handheld technology. I have to tell you, after having this phone for a few days, I am absolutely loving it. The only thing this phone doesn’t do is record video, unless it does and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Having just stepped into the boundries of Blackberry, I’m awed and impressed.
The Pearl has seemless integration with GMail, which was important to me. The email features are outstanding. This doesn’t have a full 1 key per letter keyboard, but typing is just as fast (most of the keys are doubled up i.e. A/S are on one key), because of the QWERTY keyboard layout. It has built in support for Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ and Blackberry instant messenging.
The trackball navigation is pretty slick. You can pretty much do everything you need to with your thumb just by moving and pressing the trackball. Voice activated dialing is also built in.
The address book is nice and take me back to the days of an old phone I had many years ago. My V300, I had to store HOME and WIFE CELL seperately, as did for DAD HOME, DAD OFFICE, DAD CELL etc. Now, I just have an entry for DAD, and in that entry I have all his phone numbers, email, addresses etc.
The address book synchronizes with the Contact list from my Microsoft Outlook. Same with the calendar, tasks and memos, so I can keep them all synched up just like a regular Palm thingy. Right now I do the synchronizations via USB, but hoping that a new laptop soon with also have Bluetooth installed and then I can go all wireless.
Browsing the internet is just as fast on my phone as it is at my house it seems (I have 1.5 Mbps down at home). Now, I know that my phone doesn’t process the backgrounds, styles etc (I have them turned off) but going to CodeBetter came up in a flash.
The picture quality of photos I take is much better with the Pearl than it was with my V300. Its 1.3 megapixels with 5x zoom and built-in flash.
Blackberry Maps is very cool. I just punch in an address and it brings up the map, or I can get driving directions as well. It doesn’t have a GPS receiver in it, so this is the next best thing.
This thing knows when you have it holstered or not. You can set it up so that if you have it holstered, it will only vibrate when an email comes in, or ring and vibrate when you get a phone call, or play a tune when somebody IMs you. When you take it out, it knows it and plays different tunes, doesn’t vibrate, or however you set it up. Cool stuff.
Tons of applications available for this phone at Handango. 547 for the Pearl. Many other devices are listed there as well.
I also bought a 1 GB memory chip for the Pearl. I can load tons of MP3s and play them right on my phone, just like an IPod.
So in short, I have a phone, Palm, IPod, camera, email etc all in one device. Sounds just like a laptop, eh?