Review: BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 was announced back at WES just a short month ago, and is about ready for primetime. It builds upon RIM’s older Pearl family with an upgraded HVGA display, optical trackpad to replace the now-defunct trackball, a new 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, and is the first BlackBerry to host Wi-Fi 802.11n. When combined with BlackBerry OS 5.0, the Pearl 3G is effectively a miniaturized Bold 9700.

Coming from the Bold 9000, I was already prepared to miss the luxurious screen size, but remembered my time with the original Pearl 8100 fondly, mostly in terms of how pocketable it was and how quick I was with the SureType keypad. Wi-Fi n was a big pull, and I was curious to see how much better it was than the Wi-Fi on the vast majority of handsets I had used in the past.

From the pictures alone, the 9100 looked like a solid, if perhaps too-familiar refresh on an established family of BlackBerrys. Carrying the first proper BlackBerry brand name, the Pearl 3G had a significant heritage to live up to. So… does it?

Pros

• Pocketable
• Tight design and construction
• Smooth, stable operating system

Cons

• Reduced screen size
• Little gain from Wi-Fi 802.11n
• Optical trackpad susceptible to sunlight interference

Hardware

First off, it has to be said that the BlackBerry Pearl 3G is extremely well built. The various parts are very snugly assembled, and the keypad is much tighter than I remember the old Pearl being. Build quality aside, the 9100 has mad style. We’ll get into that in a bit. First, the hard specs.

• Dimensions: 108 x 50 x 13.3 mm, 93 g
• Display: 2.6″, 360 x 400 LCD display
• Processor: 624 Mhz processor
• Memory: 256 MB
• Battery: 1150 mAh (5 hours talk, 18 days standby)
• Bands: 800 (850)/1900/2100 MHz UMTS (also in 900/1700/2100 MHz variety), 850/900/1800/1900 MHz EDGE
• Bluetooth: 2.1, includes Stereo Audio profile

So, back to looks. The chrome accent is nice and dark, and not so obnoxiously silver as other BlackBerrys. The rubberized siding and seamlessly-integrated convenience keys (much like the 8520 and 8530 Curve) add a tonne of grip and smoothness. The lines are both sharp and curvy, reminding me a lot of the X10 Xperia. The battery door adopts the same single-slate style as the 8500-series BlackBerry, which has always been my favourite since it minimizes the number of moving parts to fiddle with. Not all moving parts are bad, though – there’s a new one under the battery door that allows you to easily pop out the SIM card without having to dig and pry. It’s much better than the hinge that most other BlackBerrys are packing.

As nice as the size is, it’s not actually that much bigger than the first Pearl, as you can see compared here to the iPhone and BlackBerry 8120. It’s got a nice amount of weight to it without being too heavy – a very nice medium. As far as input goes, the optical trackpad, though ostensibly a step up from the older trackball, still fritzes out in direct sunlight. That’s almost as inconvenient as occasionally getting grit stuck beneath the trackball, really. RIM’s two-letter-per-key SureType keyboard has a learning curve to it, so be prepared. Like most predictive systems, you have to learn to trust the dictionary to figure out what it is you’re trying to say. There’s one major caveat with SureType: if you type something wrong, it will predict your word wrong, and probably mess up the word even worse than if you just screwed up a single letter on a QWERTY keypad. If you’re comfortable with prediction, you might also want to look into the 9105 variant, which has a standard numeric keypad that feature phone users might be more comfortable with. We aren’t sure if the 9105 is going to be exclusive to Europe right now, but we’re guessing so.

Software

The BlackBerry 9100 comes with OS 5.0.0.629. 5.0 launched with the Storm2, incorporating a lot of visual upgrades like bubbly, finger-friendly drop-down menu items, as well as more practical stuff, like e-mail flags and remote file lookups. You can see the whole list of new features in 5.0 over here at RIM’s knowledgebase. In a broad sense, it has a lot of graphical improvements and is generally smooth and enjoyable, but of course, that largely depends on what you’re used to. BlackBerry is still a clear-cut, no-nonsense experience, geared to help you get tasks done quickly, not prettily. If you’re coming from Android, iPhone, or webOS, you’ll probably be pretty unimpressed with the the staid icon layout and seemingly-antiquated menu system, but take some time and learn its nuances and efficiencies. You get a BlackBerry to get shit done, son.

What kind of efficiencies are we talking, here? Well, let’s look at the messages app, where folks spend most of their time. Out of the box it just handles e-mail, but after fiddling with the options, you can get SMS messages in there too. Once you start downloading official RIM apps, like Google Talk, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, your messages app quickly becomes a lot more than just e-mail – it becomes a hub for your every major means of communication. Most of those apps also plug into your address book, allowing you to see information gathered from a variety of sources, like caller ID pics from Facebook, and GTalk status messages. Even the media app lets you quickly and easily shoot pictures out to whatever social networks support it. If you don’t feel like digging through menus for what you want, you can often pull up a “short menu” by just clicking on the touchpad, and it generally offers the most common tasks, and even highlights the single most common first to allow quick double-clicks to take care of business. See, it’s the little things.

I’ve been using BlackBerry for awhile, so when someone calls the OS unintuitive, I have a really hard time agreeing. I can certainly see how a lot of options can be overwhelming, but once you find the options that you use regularly, it’s hard to imagine a faster, simpler way to get to them. Still, if you’re worried that the BlackBerry experience would be too complicated for you, I would be aghast if the new OS 6.0, and all of its streamlined UI and flashiness, wasn’t going to be available on the BlackBerry Pearl 9100. It’s also worth noting that the app selection (and prices) for BlackBerry is far from stellar. If you’re coming from the iPhone, App World will definitely leave you wondering what you signed a new two-year contract for. You likely won’t be swapping out for new apps every other week. If you’re lucky, you’ll find something worthwhile once every few months, and even then you may have to begin budgeting your app memory depending on how desperate you become for new apps.

Just remember that keyboard shortcuts make life a helluva lot easier, and there are some subtle, seamless things that RIM does to make your life easier when inputting text. For example, when typing an e-mail address, the first time you hit spacebar puts in an @ symbol and the second one is a period. Capitals and periods are generally automatically done, and there’s a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts to make navigating apps easier – be sure to learn them early, and they’ll become second-nature in no time.

Multimedia

The web browser is just about as ho-hum as ever; it does the job, it chokes a little less on Javascript than it used to, and the trackpad feels a bit nicer for cursor use, but I still find the whole cursor thing to be awkward and clunky. I wish the browser would just snap to links and scroll down automatically, like the Google Mobile app handles it; maybe there will at least be an option for it in the revamped browser… I’m still waiting on Flash support so I can finally watch YouTube videos from the mobile site, which, for whatever reason, still doesn’t work for me. In the meantime, there are always third party alternatives like Bolt and Opera Mini.

The top-mounted media keys on the BlackBerry 9100, borrowed from the 8500 Curve series, will definitely be catching the eye of people looking for a phone that can play their music. Currently, microSD cards cap out at 16 GB, so hardcore music fans will probably still want a dedicated music player, but for me and casual listeners, 16 GB is enough. As for those media controls, I’ve found them a little inconvenient. When you’re pushing the phone into your pocket or a holster, you’re most likely to be pushing down from the top of the device, making accidental presses on any of the controls more than likely. On most other BlackBerrys, you only have the pause/play (mute) key to get in your way, leaving track skips to pressing and holding the volume keys on the side. I understand RIM needs to visibly label their phones as music-friendly, but I feel in this case, they may have sacrificed too much.

The 3.2 megapixel camera with flash performs reasonably well, as you can see – here’s another picture in daylight conditions. I’d still like to see some more options, such as manually setting the exposure and cropping, but as is, a lot of the automatic settings can handle your everyday shooting. I’m itching to try out the BlackBerry 9670 clamshell, if only for the 5 megapixel camera – of course, pixels only count for so much. Lenses, sensors, and software are just as important. One thing I’m glad to see continuing with the right-side convenience key (default for the camera) is a two-level press, so you can activate the autofocus without shooting. That’s still a relatively new feature, but the Storm2 has it as well.

Signal Strength and Battery Life

Call quality is pretty standard on the BlackBerry Pearl 3G. Of the half-dozen or so calls I made, none dropped, and everything was heard just fine. Battery life felt a little bit better than my Bold 9000, but that’s probably because it’s losing its charge after two years of heavy use. The 9100′s battery managed to get through a day of moderate use just fine, usually with a bit leftover for the next morning if you turned it off overnight. What I was really interested in, though, was Wi-Fi 802.11n.

This is the next class of Wi-Fi up from g, and the highest we have now. In theory, n should bump speeds up to 600 Mbit/s, a significant jump from 54 Mbit/s that b and g offered, on top of a boost in range. Unfortunately, in my tests with the 9000 and 9100 side-by-side, I found zero difference whatsoever. In some cases, the Bold even had better range. I can only imagine that battery and processor power act as significant bottlenecks, but the bottom line is that you really shouldn’t count on 802.11n affecting your buying decision. It’s good that RIM is keeping up with interoperability, it’s just too bad that it can’t really take advantage of the higher speeds.

Verdict

What really got to me by the end of my time with the BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 is that it really does provide the fullest BlackBerry experience possible with little to no compromises made for the sake of size. The reduced screen size, though a necessary evil, is counterbalanced by the convenience and portability of a slimmer handset. The SureType keyboard takes training, and will not feel like it’s worth it for the first few weeks, but in time you can type just as fast on it as with a standard QWERTY keyboard. I didn’t quite get back to my prime speeds again, and still stumbled on irregular words and typos, but I only had less than a week to play with it.

So, who should pick up the BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100? People who have to juggle a lot of balls, but don’t want to immediately be recognized as an office monkey chained to their BlackBerry. The Pearl form factor always did an excellent job of camouflaging as a “normal” phone – the 9105 and its numeric keypad is a clear nod to that status. Personally, I don’t mind having a big fat phone, but for those that do, the BlackBerry Pearl 3G will treat you well. The screen is excellent, the software extremely practical, and the casing incredibly stylish, however, it’s not much more than a smaller version of the Bold 9700.