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BlackBerry Pearl 8100 Cell Phone Review
By Mr.Mac | May 18, 2007
Recently, our company has invested in providing a BlackBerry Pearl 8100 to all of the technicians. At first, I have to admit, I was skeptical about the whole concept. My skepticism came in many areas….how can my fat fingers and thumbs work the keys? How accessible do I really want to be? After using an Axim for a few years, how will I get along without Word and Excel? These were just a few of my initial concerns.
After I got it, I discovered a few really great features and I have to admit, I’m really warming up to the little device and its making my life a little bit easier. One of the main requirements for purchasing the BlackBerry was to have immediate access to customer support emails. As a technician, I’m not always in front of Outlook or Webmail, so I need to know if someone’s having a problem. This is one of the areas where this little device has become a major tool in my IT toolbox. I have to admit, it took a little playing and customizing to get it exactly where I wanted it to be.
By saying playing and customizing, what I mean is that I quickly found a difference between a BlackBerry email account any a link to our company’s POP3 server. Since we are just starting with BlackBerry, we have yet to implement the Enterprise Server. However, I have found good solutions that don’t really require it if you don’t mind a little extra work in setting it up. The differences I mentioned above is that it seems like mail isn’t always pulled by BlackBerry’s servers when they need to get it from our POP3 server. In addition, if Outlook is open and I walk away (forgive me a tech should never walk away from an open email client), I may go into a meeting or some other activity and my email is accumulating in Outlook without ever seeing the light of day on the BlackBerry. My solution to this was to create a BlackBerry email account and setup a forwarder on our email server. This provides instant notification of any email I receive, regardless of whether Outlook is open or not.
This configuration also provides another advantage too. If you’re like me, waiting 15 minutes for an email is frustrating. I spoke with BlackBerry’s support and also compared my discussions with them with the logs from Exim (our mail server) and I see that when there are few emails being received in my account, BlackBerry’s server only checks every 15 minutes. If there are a lot of emails being received, it can be checking as frequently as 1 or 2 minutes for mail. I can’t blame BlackBerry for this…they’re providing a service that will work for most people…I’m just too anal retentive to be content with a 15 minute lag time.
After configuring my BlackBerry email address, shortly after that, discovered the ability to setup filters. At first I thought a filter would just block or permit emails to come to the BlackBerry. I was excited to find that if you set up a filter to allow email and mark the filter as a Level 1 Message, it will give you the ability to assign specific rings or vibrations to those messages. Awesome!!! When I’m on call, I can receive a Level 1 Message from any of my maintenance customers and I am instantly notified of the problem. The nice thing about this (not too nice at 3 am) is that all email still flows to my BlackBerry, but only specific emails will sound an audible alarm. This is huge for me (and my clients)!!
As you can tell, I’m just a little excited about the email capabilities of the Pearl. There are a few other features that it has that are helpful too. Some of these include real-time maps & directions, calendar, contacts, voice recognition, alarm clock, camera, task list, notes, password keeper, Internet browser and a media player. Oh…and blue tooth!! Wow! This is the first device I ever had with blue tooth except for my laptop which up to this point was disabled.
If you’re going to invest in the Pearl, I strongly suggest you invest in a Motorola BlueTooth Head Set. These little ear pieces are much clearer than their wired counterparts and the pain of catching a wire while your walking around is eliminated. My ear rejoices!!
Along with the ear piece, I have to admit that this is the first voice recognition software on a phone that I’ve ever had success with. It actually works!! You don’t need to do anything special to get it operational either. If you have contacts in you Outlook Contacts folder and they are synched to your BlackBerry, voice recognition will work immediately. It goes something like this….Press the button on the ear piece I say…call John Jones Mobile. It may immediately recognize the name and start calling. Or…It may ask “Did you say call John Jones Mobile?” At which point I answer yes. It then calls. It also dials the extension if there is one in the contact’s information. It will also dial a phone number…in other words, you just press the button and say “call 412-555-5555″. It may confirm the number and then start dialing.
There are a lot of reviews out there that talk about the camera. Almost everyone said that it is lacking in clarity and contrast. This I have to agree is one of the negatives about the Pearl…that is if you’re expecting high quality photos. I wasn’t expecting this, so it isn’t that big of a deal to me.
Multitap is another function that took a little getting used to. The best way to describe it is that when you start entering a word, it makes the best guess as to what the word can be based on the keys you press and the possible combinations it can find in the dictionary. An example…lets use the word “test.” The letters on the keys that make up the word include TY, ER, AS, TY. This combination of letters can only make up so many words…and based on your historical usage and how it fits into the context of what you’re typing, the Pearl usually picks the correct word. This is a little different than the BlackBerry big brothers that have one letter per key, but its still rather easy to get used to.
Overall, I can’t say how much I love this little device. It has revolutionized how our company is able to work and tremendously increased our efficiency in reacting to alerts and customer issues. The intelligence built into the Pearl 8100 is tremendously vast and goes a long way toward making it very user friendly. By the time you’re completed with all the little customizations and tweaks I’m sure you’ll do, it works like an extension of yourself. I highly recommend the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 to anyone who needs quick, reliable access to information any time, anywhere.
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