BlackBerry RIM 8100 Pearl Reviews
October 26th, 2006 - Posted in RIM BlackBerry
BlackBerry RIM 8100 Pearl is not only the smallest BlackBerry ever, but it’s also the first to incorporate multimedia features generally deemed unnecessary by the traditionally corporate BlackBerry clientele. Equipped with a 1.3 MP camera and media player in its corner, can the Pearl win the masses over to the BlackBerry way of life
PCmag review the BlackBerry RIM 8100 Pearl and writes “The camera, music, and video players are all of startlingly high quality, but they each lack one or two key features. (Corporate users shouldn’t freak out about the new media features. BlackBerry Enterprise Server owners can lock out any of these options.) The 1.3-megapixel camera, with a little flash and a self-portrait mirror, takes strikingly sharp pictures with excellent color balance outdoors, though I did see some annoying JPEG artifacting. Indoors, color noise becomes quite noticeable. You can change the white balance and compression rate, but there are no burst, macro, or video modes. The Pearl’s music player handles MP3, AAC, and WAV audio files, and it even shows album art. But you can’t search by album, artist, or title, though you can organize songs in folders and play the contents of a folder. Videos look absolutely terrific at 24 frames per second, but the video player has no full-screen mode, and you can only navigate through long files in increments of three minutes.”
Phonedog review the BlackBerry RIM 8100 and writes “At first glance, the Pearl looks like a cross between a Motorla SLVR and BlackBerry’s 7100 series business phones. The SLVR part is due to the Pearl’s wonderfully small form factor: at 107 x 51 x 14mm the phone is slimmer than a folded-shut RAZR, and at only 89g it’s one of the lightest smartphones you’ll ever hold.
The resemblance to the BB 7100 series is due in large part to the candybar form factor and SureType keyboard found on the Pearl. SureType is BlackBerry’s predictive text solution that combines software that learns your favorite words with a keypad that spreads a QWERTY layout over an extended dialing keypad.
In the case of the Pearl, the keypad houses some 20 buttons is a space barely wider than that of an average candybar phone’s 12-button dialing pad. The result are keys that are rather small - somewhat uncomfortably small, at least for my thumbs. The alphabet is spread over 15 keys, two letters per key save for “L” and “M,” which get their own buttons. Unlike the two letter per button keypad on Sony’s m600i, on which buttons can actually be pressed to the left or right to select different characters (i.e. left for E, right for R), the Pearl’s buttons only press in one direction each. Which character a button activates is controlled by the SureType software or, in MultiTap mode, the number of times you press the button”