Spec Check: BlackBerry Pearl

Written by Adam Gosling

Wednesday, 29 November 2006

Page 1 of 2 If email is important to you, but not important enough to make you carry around one of the more ungainly BlackBerry devices, then Research In Motion's latest attempt at a consumer smartphone could be well worth a look. This phone is sleek and sexy. Attractively finished in black and polished silver the Pearl is diminutive in stature, but stacks up well enough as an all-rounder to make this phone acceptable even without the advanced email integration capabilities. Unfortunately it's not 3G capable so some of the more advanced video features we have come to expect in Australia are going to be missing form this smartphone, so the Pearl comes with a 1.3 megapixel digital still camera. It does have a self portrait mirror to take pics of yourself. There's a built-in flash and 5x digital zoom and the phone can be held in a traditional horizontal way for photography. Of course the GPRS/EDGE connectivity of this Quad-band GSM phone will allow you to send and receive pictures and you can easily send your happy snaps via email, Messenger or MMS. Rounding out the multimedia capabilities, the BlackBerry Pearl comes with a media player supporting a variety of music and video file formats such as MP3, ACC, MPEG4 and H.263 and includes a stereo headset jack. The BlueTooth 2.0 capabilities support handsfree headsets and a range of devices include GPS reciever. Okay it's not the smallest phone you can find, but the Pearl is small for a fully featured smartphone and pretty light in the pocket too. It measures just 107x50x14.5mm and weighs in at 89 grams. In that space RIM has managed to cram a reasonable sized screen which is 240x260 resolution but only displays 65k colour. It is described by the company as "incredibly vivid and crisp" and has the added advantage of built-in light sensing technology which automatically adjusts the screen and keyboard brightness for optimum viewing. The keyboard is not the full QWERTY thumboard you will find on the larger BlackBerrys and uses the SureType layout with predictive texting to compensate for the lack of keys. A 64MB onboard storage allowance can be upgraded with via an internal microSD card slot to give you more space for music, pictures and videos. << Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>