We take a look at Sprint's new Pearl, with navigation courtesy of TeleNav and Sprint's music store. Is this high-speed Pearl the one to buy?
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (Sprint):
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_it00.jpg) Well, this certainly isn't the best Pearl of the bunch. Though Sprint's Pearl does show signs of improvement over the first-generation GSM models, it has a few problems that would keep us from choosing it over other models. Most importantly, it was sluggish, and perhaps even buggy. Some Web pages refused to load at all, with no error or warning from the BlackBerry. Dealing with Sprint's music player was a real hassle, and diminished the added value of having the Sprint Music Store on board. Don't get us wrong, we liked the improvements, like the slight graphical upgrade and the ports for a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSDHC card. But the same can be found elsewhere, without the problems. Release: November 2007. Price: $200.
Pros: Interface just a bit prettier. Very good call quality. Great scheduling options
Cons: Sluggish phone. Web pages load slowly, GPS tracks slowly, music playlist populates slowly.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (Sprint) Review:
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Design - Very good
The Sprint version of the BlackBerry Pearl differs little, if at all, from the other recent versions of this phone, except that it is available in a deep, dark purple. Otherwise, it sports the same wavy, SureType keypad, the same eponymous trackball, and the slim design that this phone brought to the BlackBerry family just over a year ago. The newer Pearls feature a 3.5mm headphone jack, a welcome addition to any phone, as well as a memory card slot that is easier to reach.
We've been critical of the BlackBerry interface for some time, but on this Pearl we're pleased to report that the stodgy, heavily-textual interface has seen a graphical face lift. Not an overhaul, but a few nice colors and boxes have been placed around forms, and the system font has been smoothed out and cleaned up a bit. It is still a BlackBerry, and the top-level menus are unchanged, but once we started digging, we were pleased to find an interface that was much easier to read, and much friendlier to view.
Calling - Very good
We were very impressed with calls made on the BlackBerry Pearl 8130. Calls sounded nice and clean, with no static or reception issues. Callers weren't fooled into thinking we were on a landline, but this is top-notch for cellular phone quality. Reception was pretty good; we generally saw about 4-5 bars in our lower Manhattan offices, but this didn't seem to affect calls, as we never lost a connection.
RIM's BlackBerry address book is very good, with live searching that makes fine use of the SureType keys to predict input. For instance, when we typed "Phi," the phone found this editor's name, but also our contacts at Ogilvy because the keys also correspond to the letters "Ogi." Happily, RIM has finally updated the look of the address book, and most of the PIM software. While we don't see a significant feature boost, the look is much more clean and colorful, easier to read and much more pleasant to use.
The Pearl 8130 includes all of our favorite calling options. A dedicated button on the side activates speaker-independent voice dialing. While this was a bit too easy to activate accidentally, it worked very well, and made almost no mistakes in our tests. Connecting a conference call was easy and intuitive, though we would have liked the phone's screen to give us more info about our three calls, as it didn't even let us know we were all joined together. Bluetooth worked fine for handsfree calling, and the speakerphone was adequately loud for use in a moving car.
Messaging - Good
In some ways the BlackBerry Pearl is a great messaging phone, but in other ways it stumbles, or simply doesn't show up for the party. In terms of push e-mail, if your company is using a BlackBerry server, you're in luck, because RIM's push is fast and responsive. It lacks the HTML e-mail that we're seeing on the iPhone and Windows Mobile 6 phones, but the phone can handle up to 10 e-mail accounts at once, which is impressive. Unfortunately, some of those e-mail accounts might require the desktop redirector software, which basically just forwards your mail to your phone. We always find such software obtrusive, and a step beneath a direct connection to an e-mail server.
The Pearl includes SMS messaging, but not instant messaging, unless you want to chat with another BlackBerry owner. BlackBerry messenger is the only IM client available. Third party clients can be purchased for the BlackBerry OS, but Sprint really should have packed in an IM client for such a consumer-oriented smartphone.
Typing on the Pearl's keys was fine. We think that the new wavy design feels more solid than the older, first-generation Pearl keypad, whose keys felt like they were about to fall off. Still, users used to the larger, discrete QWERTY keys on the BlackBerry Curve or 8800 series might have trouble with the tightly packed, slick SureType keyboard. We don't fault the SureType layout. We like the design, and we found the Pearl's intuition to be impressive, especially its ability to learn which word choices we preferred.
Multimedia - Good
Sprint has given the Pearl a bit of the Power Vision treatment, though perhaps it would have been better to leave well enough alone. The phone has access to the Sprint Music Store, but the player on the store operates separately from the standard, RIM-issued music player. And the Sprint player is slow. It took a long time to populate our playlists, and though we were using an admittedly large 8GB card, this isn't beyond the phone's capabilities, so the experience should have been much faster.
Also, though we tried opening the Sprint TV app numerous times, the program crashed at various points along the way each time we tried. We were never able to get a video streaming on the phone. Still, Sprint TV has never really impressed us much. A more useful feature is HandMark's OnDemand service, which Sprint bundles with many of their smartphones. Basically a portal for information like weather and movie time, OnDemand looks good on the Pearl, but suffers from the same sluggishness as the Sprint Music Store. Of course, on our Sprint Palm Treo 755p, the OnDemand app is also a bit slow, but on the Sprint Pearl this only compounds the issue.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
The calendar app on the BlackBerry is top notch, second only, perhaps, to Microsoft's own mobile Outlook calendar when paired with the desktop app. We miss being able to invte attendees to events, but it was the only major feature we were missing. Otherwise, the calendar benefits from a visual upgrade similar to what we found in the address book. Fonts are smoothed out, and some nice colored boxes outline and organize choices, rather than confronting the user with long lists of ugly, jagged type. There isn't a real feature bump, but the visual improvements make the calendar much nicer to use.
For productivity, you can view Office documents, but you can't edit them. We checked out a large Excel spreadsheet, and the phone was able to browse and search, but any additions were out of the question. With it's full keyboard, it would have been nice to do some basic editing, but advanced users will probably want a larger, QWERTY device anyway.
Camera - Good
The camera on the BlackBerry Pearl has seen a slight upgrade to a 2-megapixel sensor. The lens quality was not very good, but passable. Images were noisy with blurry edges, but colors weren't exaggerated, and details were available, if not clear. Photo management on the BlackBerry isn't pretty, but there are plenty of options to send your photo via Bluetooth, e-mail or SMS.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the BlackBerry Pearl now falls into the older generation of mobile browsers, apps that don't try to approximate a desktop experience, but renders a usable page on the mobile screen nonetheless. Layout on our homepage was messy in the single-column view, but images came through okay. On Sprint's usually-speedy EV-DO network, pages loaded very slowly, and sometimes completely failed to load. The phone seemed to choke on our homepage indefinitely, with no sign that it was giving up, or succeeding.
Navigating pages with the trackball seems to be a bit easier this time around. The browser seemed to accelerate when we flicked the ball relentlessly faster. We also liked having the option to toggle the trackball's function between a cursor arrow and straight scrolling. We still think that a responsive touchscreen is easier to use, but RIM has improved the browsing experience just enough to be more enjoyable.
Navigation - Good
The Sprint BlackBerry Pearl 8130 has GPS built-in, but you won't want to rely on it. Though the phone can use Sprint's own navigator program, which is powered by TeleNav, the phone was rarely able to find us as we wondered around lower Manhattan. On our commute to New Jersey, on the more open highways, the phone finally caught on, but navigation was still problematic. The GPS sensor seemed able to maintain a hold on us once it found our initial position, but the phone, which seemed sluggish downloading Web pages, also lagged behind refreshing the maps on the navigation software. In fact, BlackBerry Maps loaded so slowly that we abandoned it after only a couple attempts to zoom in on our location.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130 is available from Sprint for $200 with a contract. A mail-in rebate of $100 is available, when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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