Verizon Wireless picks up the BlackBerry clamshell, a foldable Pearl with all the messaging features you'd expect from RIM. Read all about it in our BlackBerry Pearl Flip review.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip:
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 The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 is an impressive, compact smartphone. Though the form, along with the keyboard, has been condensed and folded for a clamshell, RIM hasn't skimped on the messaging and productivity options that make BlackBerry phones a hit with business users. With its slick interface, easy multimedia options and impressive Web browsers, we think this would make a great first smartphone for buyers stepping up from a lesser device. Still, experience users will lament the struggling performance, which slowed down every feature on the phone, and experienced BlackBerry users will long for the battery life of larger devices (to check out the best BlackBerry devices for battery life, click here). Even so, with a low starting point and a full complement of advanced smartphone features, the RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8230 on Verizon Wireless is a great choice for buyers looking for a small and light, yet capable device. Release: June 2009. Price: $10.
Pros: Top-notch messaging options. Clever, light design. Colorful screen and updated interface.
Cons: Feels a bit cheap and flimsy. Mediocre performance hurt usability. Lacked impressive battery life of larger BlackBerry devices.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip Review:
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Design – Very Good
The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 on Verizon Wireless looks almost identical to the same phone we saw last Fall on T-Mobile, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220. It's basically a BlackBerry Pearl redesigned as a flip phone instead of a candybar. The Pearl Flip 8230 uses a condensed, SureType keyboard that doubles up some of the letters to fit an entire alphabet on only 20 keys. The eponymous Pearl trackball is deeply recessed on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip, sunk into a deep well, and we greatly prefer this design. It made a comfortable groove for our thumbs to flick the ball hither and thither. Our biggest problem is that the Pearl Flip is a phone that feels very cheap. We like the light weight, it's a phone that you can carry in a pocket without weighing down your pants. But the light plastics and the abundant empty space give the phone a cut-rate feel. Perhaps that's appropriate, since the Pearl Flip is now the cheapest new BlackBerry Verizon Wireless offers.
The 2.4-inch, QVGA (320 by 240 pixels) screen on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 looked sharp and colorful. The phone also uses a smaller, 1.6-inch screen on the external flip. The external screen was useful and looked great, but you won't be able to open any apps or use the phone with the flip closed. That's okay, because the internal screen really shines, mostly thanks to RIM's greatly improved themes and home screen designs. Those aging BlackBerry icons have been replaced by sharp, black buttons that glow as you select them. The basic structure hasn't changed much, and the BlackBerry interface can still feel like there's a pager buried just below the surface. But it's still a pleasure to use, thanks to the colorful new look. In many ways, the BlackBerry interface is still bucking the recent smartphone trend. While newer smartphones are eliminating menus and settings screens in favor of gestures and ease-of-use designs, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip is heavily laden with long sub-menu lists, and deep settings that can be very confusing to use. There's a lot of power buried within, but if you want to change a setting, to display image attachments within the text of an e-mail, perhaps, you'll be foraging through multiple menus to find the right fix. Corporate users will appreciate the deep customization options, but consumers might be scared off.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 was very good. We tested the phone on Verizon Wireless' network in the Dallas metro area, and we saw a solid 5 bars of reception throughout our trial period. Calls sounded nice and clean, and callers reported no trouble understanding us. Battery life on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip was solid, though not quite up to our normal expectations for RIM's BlackBerry devices. We managed more than 5 hours of talking time with the phone, which is pretty good for a small smartphone like this. Still, the T-Mobile version topped out closer to 6 hours, and some of the bigger, badder BlackBerry phones can go 8 hours or more. Still, in an average day's use, you won't need to recharge the BlackBerry during your lunch break to make sure it works later that evening.
The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 gets Verizon Wireless' Visual Voicemail app, and we're pleased to see Verizon spreading the visual voicemail love around, because it's a great setup, and clearly it's the future of voice mail. When new voicemail arrives, you just open the app and pick the one you want to hear. It's quick and easy, and it looks great. Otherwise, there wasn't any calling feature the BlackBerry Pearl Flip lacked. The phone has a dedicated button on the side for voice dialing, and the voice dialing app worked perfectly in our tests. Conference calling was easy to execute, and the phone had no trouble pairing with our Bluetooth headsets.
Messaging – Very Good
BlackBerry phones are the kings of messaging devices, and even a budget model like the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 gets the best that RIM has to offer. The Pearl Flip 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 Outlook Web Access for our corporate accounts. We wish the phone would use Google's IMAP settings instead of POP, but all of our accounts synchronized nicely, and the phone did a great job reporting new messages as soon as they arrived. 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 BlackBerry Messenger. In addition to these options, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip on Verizon Wireless comes with apps for Facebook and MySpace available for download. We wish these apps could link their respective e-mail and Instant Messaging options to the Pearl Flip
The keyboard on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 felt nice and wide. 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. We wish there were more keys for punctuation. Only letters get their own keys, so you'll have to press alt- for a period, @ sign or other common symbols. This slowed us down a bit, but the BlackBerry is smart enough to add a period when you press the space bar twice, then capitalize the next letter. It's these nice, smart touches that make the BlackBerry a popular platform, and the phone is loaded with them.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
We wish there was something new to say about scheduling and productivity apps on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230, but these are pretty much unchanged from previous BlackBerry phones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, The BlackBerry calendar is solid and easy to use, and almost 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. Typing proper names and addresses in the calendar entries was a bit of a pain with the SureType keyboard, but as we said, the phone is smart enough to learn new names and preferences after you've corrected it once or twice.
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. The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230's keyboard might be a bit cramped for creating new documents, but if you plan to create a new spreadsheet on the go, you can do so for a small additional fee.
You can also use the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 on Verizon Wireless as a tethered modem to connect your laptop to the Internet. The phone uses Verizon's VZ Access Manager software, and we're never big fans of using a software gateway to connect. We like it better when we plug the phone into our laptop and it simply works, as Verizon Wireless' software can be buggy. In our tests, we had to reinstall once and restart a few times when the software had trouble. Still, when it works it's a great tool.
Multimedia – Very Good
Multimedia options on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 are greatly improved using the BlackBerry Media Sync application on your PC. BlackBerry Media Sync searches your iTunes library and synchronizes non-DRM songs and playlists to your BlackBerry. It's like the sync options on the new Palm Pre, but there's fewer shenanigans that might annoy Apple. Synchronizing music could be very slow, and the app is still in beta on the Mac side, so it crashed a couple times during our test period. But usually it worked great, and provided a nice option for music sync beyond Windows Media Player.
With our favorite music loaded up, we enjoyed listening on the Pearl Flip. The music player app is simple, but offers nice controls with the trackball. We especially liked the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack, so we could use our own earbuds for music, and the phone paired nicely with our stereo Bluetooth speakers. The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 on Verizon Wireless doesn't come with any preloaded memory, but the phone is able to handle microSD cards up to 16GB.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 on Verizon Wireless was surprisingly adept at handling all our favorite pages. You can set the browser to identify itself as either Firefox or Internet Explorer, instead of as a mobile browser, so the pages we loaded on CNN and the NYTimes were the full HTML versions, and not the mobile columns. The Web browser was a bit sluggish, even over the 3G connection, and here is where we miss the Wi-Fi capabilities of the T-Mobile BlackBerry Pearl Flip. Still, once pages loaded they looked great. The NYTimes and our own homepage came through clean with layout perfectly in tact. We wish that simple page navigation, like zooming and panning, was quicker, but it took some time for the phone to refresh the screen. Also, the SureType keyboard will make typing some of your favorite site names, like infoSyncworld, more difficult, until the phone starts to remember your preferences. All around, though, the Web browsing experience was good, especially for a small BlackBerry like this one.
Camera - Mediocre
The 2-megapixel camera on the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 was not very impressive. Under the best conditions, pictures could be fairly sharp, but at full crop they lacked fine details. Take a few steady shots and you're sure to find one that will be usable for Facebook or Twitter, but these won't be good enough to use as a desktop wallpaper or for real printing. The Pearl Flip is not designed well for shooting. First, the camera button on the side is directly opposite the voice dialing button on the other side, and we often accidentally squeezed them both, causing the voice dialer to open instead. Using the trackball, you'll have to be careful not to flick the ball up or down while shooting, because this controls the digital zoom, which ruined plenty of our pics, especially our self portrait shots. Finally, we wish that the external display would act as a second viewfinder. This would also help us with shooting ourselves.
Sunflower
Seed pod
Self portrait indoors
GPS Navigation – Very Good
The Verizon Wireless version of the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 uses Verizon's own VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn directions. The phone also comes loaded with the simpler mapping tool, BlackBerry Maps. We preferred VZ Navigator, and for turn-by-turn directions, the phone did a fine job. This version of VZ Navigator isn't as advanced as others we've seen. Other phones, like the Casio Exilim C721 we just reviewed, use a VZ Navigator app with voice recognition, which is a nice bonus feature that the Pearl Flip is missing. Like with the Pearl Flip's camera, we wish VZ Navigator could use the external screen, as it would be convenient to hold the phone in its closed position while navigating. Still, it did a fine job tracking us on our trip in and out of downtown, and helped us when we managed to lose our way.
Performance - Medicore
Across the board, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 suffered performance issues that made every app a little more difficult to use. The phone was very sluggish in response to key input, whether we were pressing the menu key, the dedicate camera and voice dial keys or even while using the trackball. We'd flick the ball a little, and nothing would happen for a couple seconds. Sometimes, in our impatience, we'd hit the key again, which inevitably caused some undesirable action to occur. Compared to a high-end smartphone, every action on the Pearl Flip 8230 on Verizon Wireless took more time, from opening apps to simply registering key clicks, and users thinking of stepping down from a larger BlackBerry or other device will not be satisfied with the performance loss.
Price and availability
The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 is available now from Verizon Wireless for $80 with a contract agreement.
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