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Phone review: BlackBerry Pearl 8120 |
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 Think of it as Pearl 2.0. The new Pearl is small, super-light and sexy just like the original Pearl. The 8120, available on ATnT adds several tweaks and improvements including WiFi
, an easily accessible microSD card that's compatible with SDHC cards, a 2 megapixel camera that takes video and still shots, improved text prediction and a better web browser. Like all BlackBerry smartphones, the pearl 8120 does push email with aplomb and it features a SureType keyboard where two letters share a key. It's a quad band world GSM world phone with EDGE for data.
What's New
A year and a half is a small eternity in the world of technology, and so the Pearl has undergone a transformation to the new 3.2 ounce Pearl 8120, currently offered by AT&T Wireless in the US. Perhaps the most noted addition is WiFi, and we're surprised T-Mobile wasn't the first to pick up the new Pearl 8120, which could have been at home with their Hotspot @ Home WiFi calling service.
Alas, there's no UMA or VoIP calling here, and WiFi is useful only for the web browser and XM radio (at least until SlingBox releases their BlackBerry client). But there are plenty of tweaks that make the 8120 (think of it as Pearl 2.0) a better and more fun phone.
photo taken on a cloudy day
The SureType keyboard layout remains the same: most keys are home to 2 letters and a number or symbol. This is not a full QWERTY keyboard, but as with the original Pearl, those who made do with T9 on a numeric keypad will find the 8120 a vast improvement.
RIM, makers of the BlackBerry line, have improved SureType's predictive text methods and indeed it works even better than the original model (which was by no means poor). There's also multi-press for those times you're entering unpredictable text such as a URL or password. Though pretty and shiny, the keys are a bit slippery, making it hard to breeze through text entry. Keys that house numbers are silver and you can use the Alt key to switch to numeric input, though the 'Berry automatically does this for numeric fields such as phone numbers and zip codes.
The Symbol key brings up a symbol picker and there's a single shift key, delete key and enter/carriage return key. The keyboard is backlit in white and is fairly readable in the dark. You can set the backlight timeout for the display and keyboard and control screen brightness (or let the automatic light sensor do it for you).
The microSD card slot is thankfully no longer under the battery and instead lives under a door on the phone's left side. The slot is SDHC compatible and accepts cards over 2 gigs in capacity-- given the nice media player, that's a definite plus for those who want to leave their iPod at home.
As with the original Pearl, the display resolution is 240 x 260 pixels, and web pages do feel cramped with the relative standardization of 240 x 320 QVGA on full QWERTY BlackBerry models like the Curve as well as Windows Mobile phones and Nokia S60 devices (N and E Series such as the E62 and N75 on AT&T). That said, the display is extremely bright, colorful and sharp-- really nice. And font size is adjustable on RIM devices, so you can squeeze more text in if the lesser resolution gets you down.
Photos look brilliant on the BlackBerry 8120 and video looks very good, though the media players doesn't handle streaming media and there's no MediaNet streaming service since the phone lacks 3G. Unless you're into downloading or ripping your own content, the player is mostly useful for watching video taken with the camera.
Speaking of the camera, it now takes video, while the original Pearl only took still shots. And the resolution has been upped to 2 megapixels from 1.3. We were impressed with the life-like colors and good exposure on the 8120. Certainly it doesn't compete with the Sony Ericsson K850i or Nokia N95, but among 2 megapixel fixed focus cameras, it's quite good. Low light photos have noise, but no more than other camera phones, and the colors remain balanced.
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