RIM's new BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 opens up with a new interface design and an enhanced media player. Is this the sign of good things to come?
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220:
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 With the BackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, RIM has another winner on its hands, and after spending some time with the new polished interface on this lightweight flip phone, we have to say we like it even more than the standard candybar Pearl, which is a tall order. The phone isn't the prettiest, in fact we found the shell to be a bit goofy looking. But as soon as we turned it on and so the rich contrast on the bright screen, as soon as we typed on the wider, more solid SureType keypad, we knew that this would be a compelling device. The interface is still bogged down with long, textual menus, and the Web browser won't win any iPhone converts, but T-Mobile has endowed this phone with a great feature list, including Wi-Fi calling and more messaging options than you'll find almost anywhere else. Plus, it upholds the BlackBerry's great battery life reputation, though we would have given up an hour or two of talk time for some 3G networking. Release: October 2008. Price: $150.
Pros: Great new BlackBerry user interface. Lightweight phone. Good battery life. Great messaging features, especially for IM fans.
Cons: Interface improvements don't go deep enough (especially in the calendar). Poor Web browser for a modern smartphone. Call quality could be better.
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Full review of the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220:
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Design - Very good
Don't let the "Pearl" moniker fool you, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 is in its own class. We weren't huge fans of the overall hardware design. There seemed to be a lot of empty, unused space giving the phone a less professional look. But if RIM didn't add extraneous detailing, they also didn't add any extra weight, and the Pearl Flip 8220 is surprisingly light in the hand (and in the pocket). To that end, the plastics feel a bit on the cheap side, but the keyboard still feels solid, with flush metal ridges between the rows keeping the keys in place.
Once the phone springs to life, though, you'll forget all about the matte plastic and focus only on the glowing display. RIM has clearly made display quality a priority on their next-generation devices, and the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, as the first of these to arrive in stores (before the BlackBerry Bold or the BlackBerry Storm, that is), has a dazzling, colorful display.
The new BlackBerry OS 4.6 uses a dark, rich user interface that looks great on the high-contrast screen. Icons glow as you roll over them with the trackball, and colors pop against the black background. Even the long-list menus for which BlackBerry is infamous look better in black. We wish the resolution was better than QVGA, but we hardly noticed the slight pixilation around the edges of icons. Besides the persistence of those heavy contextual menus, most aspects of the BlackBerry OS has gotten some polish with the new "Precision" theme. We would have liked to see the changes go a bit deeper, as there are still plenty of cases of black text on a white background (the contact lists and scheduling app, for instance), but overall the new BlackBerry interface seems very fresh and modern.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 was okay, with a slightly tinny, digital sound to voices, especially in the higher registers. But beyond these minor distortions, calls sounded fairly clear. Beyond this problem, though, the Pearl Flip is a solid phone, with all of our favorite calling features. The phone is a UMA-enabled HotSpot @Home phone, so you can make calls over Wi-Fi or normal cellular service (and Wi-Fi calls are practically free, as we've discussed). The phone did suffer some reception trouble, and it lagged behind other T-Mobile phones we're testing by a bar or two, which sometimes knocked it out of service range entirely. Luckily, when we were out of EDGE service range, we were usually at home under our Wi-Fi umbrella, so calls weren't interrupted.
For battery life, we tried a mix of Wi-Fi and cellular calls and managed about 6 hours of continual talk time before the Pearl Flip needed a break. This is more than most phones, and about equal to what we've seen on the UMA-equipped BlackBerry Pearl, but it's still a little disappointing for a BlackBerry. We've had larger RIM phones that lastes 8-12 hours or more, so we wish RIM would spring ahead of the pack again on these more compact models.
The contact list on the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 synchronized perfectly with our Outlook calendar using the new BlackBerry Desktop tool, and we especially liked the ability to start searching our contacts from the standby screen by simply typing a name. Even with the condensed, 20-key SureType keyboard, the Pearl Flip always knew who we were looking for. The speakerphone was adequate, though small-sounding. Conference calling could have been a bit easier. We prefer to simply press the "Call" button to join two calls, but the Pearl Flip requires an inordinate amount of menu drilling (a BlackBerry problem all around) to make and conference a second call. Speaker-independent voice dialing got its own key, though, and worked perfectly in our tests.
Messaging - Very good
For the new Pearl Flip, we were happy to see that RIM still isn't skimping on messaging options, including all of our old favorites and even a couple new tricks. All BlackBerry phones can handle up to 10 e-mail addresses, and these can mostly be set from within the phone itself, including the BlackBerry e-mail address that you can create yourself. We set up the phone for Gmail, and though we wish the phone would use Google's IMAP settings instead of POP, our account synchronized nicely. RIM groups all e-mail accounts and even SMS and MMS messaging under a single "Messages" icon, which is very convenient. Instant Messaging fans get some nice options, as well, as the Flip comes with clients for AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk and even ICQ. RIM didn't have to add much to keep their phones at the forefront of messaging options, so we're glad to see that they haven't laid down on the job.
The keyboard on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip felt nice and wide, perhaps even wider than on the candybar BlackBerry Pearl, though the two phones are only a few millimeters apart in width. If you've never used a SureType keyboard before, with RIM's own phones there is nothing to fear. The company invented this keyboard layout, and the intuitive software built in does a nice job guessing which word you meant to choose. Even better, the phone learns from its mistakes, so if it gets the word wrong the first time, it probably won't make the same error again if you correct it.
Scheduling and productivity - Good
We wish there was something new to say about scheduling and productivity apps on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip, but these are pretty much unchanged from preview BlackBerry phones. This isn't a bad thing, the BlackBerry calendar is solid and easy to use, though not quite as powerful as Windows Mobile when paired with an Exchange server. Still, the calendar needs a visual update in a big way, and it's a shame that the new OS and theme didn't bring a facelift for the calendar to show off on the gorgeous screen.
For Office document handling, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip gets a basic version of DataViz' Documents to Go suite. This worked well in our tests for viewing and editing files, including some Word and Excel documents that we sent to our test device. Unfortunately, you can't create new Office documents unless you pay for a premium version of the DataViz software. We don't really use our smartphone for creating documents, but if you do, you should be aware of the extra charge involved.
Music - Very good
The media player on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 gets a nice facelift, and comes across as one of the nicer looking apps on the phone. There aren't many features for media playback, though that doesn't mean the Pearl Flip is an amateur. The phone uses a 3.5mm headphone jack, so any standard cans will work fine, or you can go wireless with stereo Bluetooth. The trackball allows for easy shuttling through songs, though we would have liked some dedicated media controls, especially when a song was playing in the background while we were performing other tasks. Though "Now Playing" becomes a menu option while the music player is running, there were still a few hoops to jump through to pause or skip a lousy song. Playlist creation worked fine, and the player has all the standard playback and shuffling options, but we'd like to see an EQ and more control over the sound.
RIM has launched a new BlackBerry Media Sync app that allows BlackBerry phones to synchronize with the non-DRM tracks in an iTunes library folder, but we couldn't get the program to work for us. For testing, we were using a MacBook Pro dual-booting into Windows Vista, but the Media Sync app doesn't support Macs or the 64-bit version of Vista we use, though it should work fine for 32-bit users. Instead, we first tried to struggle through the Roxio Media Manager, which has been improved since the last time we railed against it, but it's still pretty confusing. For instance, why are there separate buttons for "Moving" songs to a phone and for "Copying" songs to a phone? When our album artwork didn't come through, we switched over to simply synchronizing the phone with Windows Media Player, and had a much better experience. Files synchronized very quickly, like iPod quick, and at least a couple albums came through with artwork in tact (though a couple others did not).
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Web browsing app is the worst app on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip. Considering the phone has Wi-Fi for fast data access, and especially considering the competition, not to mention the lauded Web browser on other, upcoming BlackBerry phones, this is especially disappointing. Our own homepage was a complete mess when loaded with the BlackBerry browser. Columns ran into each other, and the layout was muddled throughout. Browsing with the trackball was fine, but somewhat slow, and we wish it was smart enough to accelerate through long pages. Also, typing Web addresses with the SureType keyboard is difficult, the only task that was truly hurt by the condensed layout. Finally, for some reason RIM has included two separate icons on the Application screen for "Browser," though both of these seem to open the same app. One of them jumps directly to T-Mobile's T-Zones page, where the carrier will try, halfheartedly, to sell you new apps for your phone. It's a poor attempt, as many of the menu options on the download page lead to nothing at all.
Camera - Good
Photos taken with the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220's 2-megapixel camera were pretty lousy; standard cameraphone stuff. Outside, the camera blew out details in overexposed spots and had a generally over-sharpened look, making images look like they were pulled straight off a TV set. The camera saturated colors unnaturally, leaving fall leaves looking drab while painted street signs seemed to pop. Under our studio lights, the camera fell into a mass of noise and blurring.
Flowers under a net
Not a horrible picture, but where the sun hits on the left side is a mass of stark white. Also, try counting the petals on the flowers. Thanks to blurring, it's pretty tough.
Self-portrait
It was pretty difficult to take a self-portrait shot. First, we kept mixing up the camera button and the voice-dialing button. Then, when we tried to use the trackball, we would accidentally zoom in. Finally, with no portrait mirror, the top half of the flip opens up at a strange angle, pointing upward more than most phones, so our aim was just off. Once we got the shot, the result was a little too blown out in the bright sunlight.
Detour
The detour sign in this shot gets all the color, while the fall foliage peeking through the trees behind becomes a drab brown.
E-bay shot
At full size, noise speckles this shot everywhere, even though we took it under the even lighting of our studio lamps. Up near the top of the pic things seem sharper, but the bottom half is like looking through a dirty screen door.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 is available on T-Mobile for $150 with a contract agreement.
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