Blackberry Pearl MP3 Player Instructions ยป

So I’ve had the weekend to play around with the new Blackberry Pearl and I have to say it has been fun. There are some pretty cool features in there that I’ve never had a chance to play with before. First let me set the stage, I have only briefly used a Blackberry before (several different models though) so I don’t really know all the standard features. If I seem impressed about something that is not new to the Pearl that is why. I’ve only ever used business style cell phones before so MP3 playing and stuff seem incredibly novel to me. Ok, on to the review.

Blackberry Pearl Pictures

The device itself has a 1.3 mega pixel camera with flash, it is small and light weight, it has a beautiful color screen with a decent resolution and brightness. Out of the box it comes with a mini-USB cable, ear buds and the power adapter with many international plug styles. You can also insert a MicroSD card to expand the system memory from the (measly) 64MB internal memory to whatever you can afford. I didn’t have enough time to figure out battery life under high-use and low-use conditions but a rough approximation is about a day under high-use. The lit trackball on the front of the device is a welcome change to the typical side scroll on previous models. It is nice to be able to move in two dimensions in games and menus instead of having to use a key combination to change directions. Clicking the trackball takes a bit of practice though, sometimes it will roll when you click. I had this same issue on the old scroll as well so it might just be me. An issue that I noticed was that the menus and applications would sometimes take a very long pause before starting to work again.

The media center seems to be one of the key features of the Pearl; it includes music, video, ringtones and pictures. The device has some built-in samples in each category. You can also takes pictures and set them as your wallpaper which works quite well since you can rotate and zoom the picture in the viewer before setting it as your wallpaper. The ringtones provided are alright but I went out and and downloaded a cool Super Mario Bros. tune that ups the geek factor 10x or so. By default the phone is essentially useless as a MP3 player since the internal memory is so small and has a file size limit of 2.86MB, we all know that MP3s are 3-5MB on average. To test MP3 playback I created a music directory on the internal memory and uploaded a short file, the sounds quality was great. It looks like you must have a MicroSD card to use the Pearl as an MP3 player, thankfully you can get a 1GB card for $50CDN.

The browser works pretty well on sites that have a mobile version and even on some that provide navigation links at the top. I was impressed by the free stuff on the Blackberry network website. There are a few select games, ringtones, themes and wallpapers. A must have is the Today Plus theme which provides a great standard menu and Sodoku a great puzzle game. One issue is that Flash isn’t supported (as far as I could tell) so you can’t hear any music on MySpace or watch videos on YouTube.

All Blackberry’s utilize the Desktop Manager Software for connecting the device to a PC. Pearl comes with version 4.2 which adds a tool to interact with the Media Center on the phone. You can upload/download anything including pictures you’ve taken and MP3s from your collection (don’t forget about the default limitation I mentioned earlier). You can also do the standard Blackberry stuff like add/remove applications and synchronize your Outlook calendar, tasks, memos, etc. It is functional and it certainly is nice not to have to buy a special cable to download stuff from your phone or pay transfer costs to send it to your email.

A very cool feature that I enjoyed is the voice dialing application. It allows you to say “Call Ted Denslow” and it will look up the number from your address book and call it. If there are multiple that are similar it will give you a list to chose from. You can also say “Call 519-888-4567″, it will come back and make sure it heard the number correctly then call it hands free. The best part is you don’t have to go through a voice setup process it just uses the persons name from the address book. You do need to speak clearly and there are some options for how loose the fit is to your voice. One annoying part of the voice dialing is that you have to say the full name as entered in the address book. I put myself in as Mr. Adam Hewgill and then had to say exactly that for it to come up with the match. So I got rid of the Mr. part and just had to say Adam Hewgill. It should be able to do partials so if I say “Call Adam” it should give me a list of all the Adams’ to pick from. Overall a great and well executed feature.

Last week I noticed on the sign-in page GMail that they had launched a new mobile application that would check your account. I’ve used GMail’s mobile friendly version a few times and was impressed but the new GMail app blew me away. You have to have this if you have a GMail account and a mobile phone that supports it (couldn’t find a list sorry). Just point your browser at http://www.gmail.com/app to check it out. One major issue is that you can’t get MSN on this device (as far as I could tell) it does however have Yahoo messenger that is now supposed to be able to add MSN contacts but I don’t know if that is the case with the mobile version yet. It also has google Talk if that makes you happy.

All in all this device is great for the active Business person who is a bit hipper than those that currently use the Blackberry line-up but for sure it is not a cool enough phone for the younger non-business types. I think they are marketing it correctly because they are not competing with the Motorola RAZR or Sony Ericsson Walkman line-up. The Motorola Q and the Palm Treo 700wx are the competing products, they are all very similar it seems but I have a feeling the other two support flash in the browser. All in all a great device.