Mobile News

Release Date: To be declared.

$499.99 – Without Contract
$79.99 – With Contract

Battery:

The Blackberry batteries are usually known for die hard performance and fortunately it seems this time the new phone will deliver as well. The pearl 9100 has an 1150 mAh battery, which can give a steady 5 hours of talk time and a staggering 18 hours of standby. Do keep in mind, that this is a business phone, and not just a simple phone. So, the phone needs to have a solid battery to keep running throughout the day. The heavy duty applications, word processing, spreadsheets and much more can make any phone drop on its knees, but the Blackberry Pearl does a good job of staying alive. The battery door pops open letting you easily remove or insert the SIM card, without having to dig or pry too much. It’s much better and convenient than the hinge type slots the rest of the BlackBerrys are using.

Memory and Processor Speed:

The Blackberry pearl sports a 624 MHz processor, which does a decent job of handling the work load that its user will batter it with. With an inbuilt memory of 256 MBs, the pearl has a decent memory storage space to hold all of your vital data in a secure environment. The phone seems to be considerably faster than its predecessors, so all you Blackberry fans would be happy to use the pearl, without the lag and a faster startup.

Screen:

As always, the Blackberry’s small screen size might be a put off, but this time, they went ahead and implemented a higher resolution, making things easy to navigate on the screen. With an excellent and crisp resolution of 360 x 400 pixels, the display turns out to be an unexpectedly good result. With a 2.6” display, you should be able to browse the web, work on your documents and much more quite easily, especially with a higher resolution.

Form:

The Blackberry pearl 9100 is very well built. The various bits and pieces of the phone are quite snugly assembled. The keypad on the Pearl is quite tightly packed as compared to the older Pearl. The chrome accent seems to add a nice and dark feel contradictory to the older weird silver Blackberrys. The rubber side and seamless keys on the side add to a nice grip and overall smoothness to the phone. The lines around the phone are both sharp and curvy as well, giving it a Xperia X10 feel to the Blackberry standard. The phone is not too heavy, with a nice optical trackpad. The 9100 comes with an alternative, the 9105, which offers the typical standard numeric pad instead of the QWERTY pad. This is quite welcoming to people who are new to a smartphone or a Blackberry itself. The 9105 is not confirmed if it will be exclusive to Europe or not, that remains to be seen.

Camera:

Every mobile phone has to have a decent camera on its back now, otherwise it would be a waste to buy that phone. The Pearl has incorporated a reasonable, yet not too over the top 3.2 megapixel camera with a flash as well. This should be enough for the click-on-the-go type of enthusiasts; after all, this phone is aimed at corporate and not creative artists. The camera churns out decent pictures with a reasonably high contrast and overall good picture quality. Good enough to upload to your Flickr or Facebook accounts.

Other Features:

•    Wi-Fi 802.11n
•    Optical Trackpad
•    Bluetooth 2.1 (Inclusive of Stereo Audio Profile)
•    Smooth & Stable Blackberry Operating System 5.0
•    HVGA Display