My Treo 650 broke after 21 months of use. No reason. The phone part nolonger works but the PDA portion is fine. I was getting kind of *done* with the Treo 650 anyway. I had to get a phone.
I recently decided that I do not really like cargo pants. Actually, the pants are OK. But, having things in the cargo pockets is not all that comfortable on a long walk. In jeans and maybe a vest, gadget size starts to matter.
After lugging around my bulky Treo for almost two years, the tiny and moderately priced Blackberry Pearl caught my eye.
The obvious advantages of the Pearl are:
- Half the size of a Treo.
- Half the weight - 3.1 oz.
- Cute
- The *pearl* trackball is an easy and efficient navigation device.
- Killer Blackberry email.
- RIM seems to be going up and Palm down.
- Decent smartphone features.
It takes about 2 minutes to set up your email accounts. That was a miracle I had never seen before.
I purchased locally at Cellular World in Mill Valley. Cellular World is Cingular-only but is not an official Cingular store. That store choice could cost me, should I want a chance to get a discount on the iPhone. Apple insists that only official Cingular and Apple stores can sell the things.
Anyway. This little guy is tiny. I can type on it but people (like a lot of men) with bigger hands might not find it as easy. I like the fact that the suretype arrangement gives me a very nice numeric keypad for typing in phone numbers. The microscopic numeric keys on full-QWERTY keypads drives me nuts!
The Pearl has a MicroSD slot under the battery. Do not plan on regularly swapping cards, but once in a while might work OK. So far, you can get a 2 gig card and that will suffice for now. MicroSD cards of 4 gb are near release as of this writing.
Do not think about replacing an iPod with the Pearl unless you really are not using your iPod. The Pearl has an extremely rudimentary music player that has less than 10% of the power and convenience of the iPod. Of course, given how popular the Pearl has been, a better 3rd party music player should be available fairly soon. But, the iPod is a 5 year old device and its music player is very sophisticated in many ways. You will not match that quickly if at all.
The user manual is huge: 200+ letter-sized pages. The box comes with a tiny getting started manual that covers only the highlights of the phone. If you want to know about the task tracking features, for example, it is in the big manual on page 163.
I have some reading to do. I am committed to this little Blackberry for at least 3 months and will report back soon with more information in the on-going saga of smartphones.
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