Review: BlackBerry Pearl and Mac compatibility

Overview

I got my hands on my new BlackBerry Pearl 8100g from T-Mobile (UK) a few days ago, and, in short, I'm very impressed. I've been used to Symbian phones for some time and having bought several applications for the Symbian Series 60 platform I was reluctant to swap platforms. However, the BlackBerry Pearl sounded very tempting and T-Mobile don't have the Nokia N73 (my first Series 60 choice) yet so I went for the BlackBerry. I got it with the Instant Email service, which apparently is very strongly recommended to appreciate the phones full functionality. I'm not sure what happens if you don't have Instant Email. It doesn't take very long to set up at all and in no time emails will be coming into your phone as they arrive. It's all very cool.

Blackberry Interface

As far as the interface is concerned I think it out-performs the Series 60 platform by far. The clunky interface of Series 60 had always been a bit annoying, the lack of anti-aliased graphics and 1-bit transparency on the icons never did much for the user experience. With the BlackBerry Pearl you are instantly rewarded by soft fades of the icon titles on the main screen and anti-aliased transparent icons. In fact the level to which the themes seem to be able to be customized is amazing. Just swapping between a few of the inbuilt themes (There're about three built in ones plus the T-Mobile theme which is actually very good and the one I prefer so far) shows you completely different configurations for the 'home' screen, with completely different, and perfectly smoothed and styled fonts, for the time/date and various on-screen indicators. I'm looking forward to seeing some brilliant themes out there soon! All the built in apps are of similarly high graphical standard and are all very functional and usable too.

Key Features

This phone comes with features I have never seen in a phone before. Voice Dialing for example. Now, it's important to note I'm not talking about your standard pre-recorded voice-matching dialing as seen on most phones, the BlackBerry Pearl can do it without pre-recording! You just hit the convenience key and say 'Call Tom' and providing you have an entry that is called 'Tom' in the phone book it will bring it up and ask for confirmation, reading the name back to you! I was impressed when I realized my desktop Mac was capable of this sort of thing. Incidentally, if it matches more than one entry it will ask if you meant the closest match first and work its way through the list until you say 'yes' to the one you intended. Presumably this whole system would work extremely well with a car kit or other hands free system (the phone comes with a stereo headset for music and hands free use)

The camera is sharp for a 1.3MP camera and it has a flash which is quite neat - it even double flashes to try and reduce red-eye.

Controls

I'd always been interested in the BlackBerry SureType keyboards but had never used one before getting this phone.

There's actually quite a steep learning curve as far as learning where the keys are and I found myself going for the keys as expected on a normal phone for sometime. The keyboard works primarily in its predictive mode which works like normal predictive text, but, due to only having two letters per key instead of the normal three, it's guess on which word you want are almost always correct.

The trackball navigation works very well too. It's smooth and the sensitivity is bang on (if its not to your liking the sensitivity can be adjusted). The ball actually glows a really bright white too (also different colors when the phone rings) which I didn't expect and certainly looks cool.

The overall look and feel of the device is really impressive. The front and back is made of a smooth, polished black plastic. The camera is surrounded by a chrome area which looks good against the black. The sides of the phone are a dark (titanium-esque) chrome. The buttons are in a good place and the screen is very high resolution and nicely positioned.

Mac Compatibility

This was an issue that originally dissuaded me from heading down the BlackBerry route. As far as I was aware it was necessary to buy the PocketMac software and even then the compatibility was limited. However, I read a recent press release on the USA RIM/BlackBerry website and it offered a new version of PocketMac as a free download and it had a much improved compatibility list, synchronizing with most Mac PIM apps. It works really well too – behaving more or less in the same way iSync does normally, allowing you to select which app you want to synchronize and which will get overridden or if it will just merge. The phone can also be mounted as a removable drive. I'm not sure if this was enabled as a result of the PocketMac software of if it's capable of it normally. Either way it mounts as expected on the Mac and displays a logical file structure of Ringtones, Images, Movies etc. This is the simplest way I found of getting pictures off the phone and onto the Mac - just drag and drop from the Images folder. It works just as well the other way too - I dragged an MP3 from iTunes into the ringtones folder and it was accessible in the phone and works as a ringtone flawlessly.

However, after my initial sync I have been having some problems syncing. The PocketMac software seems to hang when the progress bar is about half way through. I found an excellent forum thread that has all sorts of issues explained on it. What I had to do was remove the battery from the Pearl for 30 seconds and reboot the Mac. I then tried syncing and it worked fine. Although it does look like I need to do this every time I need to sync, so it's anything but ideal! Also, I still can't seem to get the install application function working. I'm trying to install the Bookmarks manager that comes with PocketMac 4 but so far the program stops responding when I try and install it. I have contacted the PocketMac support team who replied promptly and said they are aware of the problem and working on a fix. Hopefully the general sync issue will be fixed too.

Summary

Overall I'm very happy with the BlackBerry. However, it does have a few quirks and areas that don't quite seem up to standard. For example:

• The 'profiles' section is fairly unintuitive.
• When you click 'download themes' from the themes section, the page that loads says the phone is not recognized! Quite annoying, although I'm sure it’s an issue on the BlackBerry site rather than with the phone and hopefully will be fixed soon.
• No Video Recording

Other than that there's nothing really significant that lets the phone down. Feel free to add opinions and comments below!