DesignThe Pearl is tiny. If you love your Blackberry but would like something smaller, this might be the way to go. Instead of having a regular QWETY keyboard, the Pearl uses RIM's SureType system. One of the most significant of these is a trackball. Instead of using a D-Pad like virtually every over handled and smartphone, you move around and select things on the Pearl's screen with a small roller-ball.
Aside from its keyboard, the Pearl is well supplied with additional buttons. On both the left and right side are what's called "Convenience Keys". By default the one on the left side lets you do voice dialing, while the one on the right opens the camera application, but these can be changed to whatever applications you prefer. Also on the right side are a pair of buttons to increase or decrease volume. On the left side of the Pearl is the headphone socket and the device's mini-USB port.
Multimedia
Audio - It can play music in the background
Video -
Images - The Pearl allows you to store a bunch of images and display them. This smartphone's screen isn't very large so you're not to be making any serious slideshow presentations from it, but the application RIM has written to handle this job well.
Ringtones - Support polyphonic, MP3, and MIDI ones.
Camera
This device has 1.3 megapixel camera, a feature that's become more pretty much a requirement for smartphones. The pearl is one of the few camera phones with a built-in-flash, but this isn't very bright. This camera does a nice job of adapting to relatively low-light situations without the flash.
Email and Messaging
RIM made its reputation on "push" email, and of course the Pearl offers this. RIM has a system that immediately sends each email to Blackberry handled or smartphone as soon as it arrives on the mail server. This means that there's little or no delay between a message being sent and it arriving on the mobile device.
The Pearl has other messaging options beyond email. It supports SMS, which means you can send short messages to other mobile phones.
Microsoft Office
One important area RIM has not made any significant progress in is allowing users to work with Microsoft Office documents. For the past few years, Blackberries have been able to view Word, Excel, Power Point and Acrobat documents that come in as email attachments, and the Pearl can do that too. But that;s as far as it goes. You can't load documents into a folder on this device and view them later. You can't also edit them.
PIM
Like all good smartphones, the Pearl comes with a suite of Personal Information Management (PIM) applications. That's a fancy way of saying that it includes an address book, calendar, and to-do-list.
These are pretty good applications. For example, you can add a picture to an address book entry, which is becoming a pretty common feature these days, but you can also have the Pearl automatically display a contact's address on a map, which is something very few devices offer right out the box. The calendar handles re-occurring events, and you can edit one member of a series of events without having to change them all. You can also hit a "snooze" button when alarms go off so you can be re-reminded of them later.
Browser
This Blackberry comes with a fairly decent web browser. It's not the best one around, but it's functional. It does a good job taking a regular web pages and reformatting them for the Pearl's 240-by-260-pixel screen.
Bluetooth
The model offers Bluetooth, which lets you wirelessly connect to a variety of accessories.
There's no doubt about it, the Pearl is a huge step forward for RIM. This smartphone offers features that many current and potential Blackberry users have been wanting for years.