Two years on, having settled a pesky lawsuit and seen Microsoft and others begin to chip away at its dominance in the mobile e-mail market, RIM has apparently changed its mind. It just introduced the BlackBerry Pearl, a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE smartphone that not only includes a camera but also plays MP3 audio files and digital videos and displays photos on its bright color LCD.

The Pearl squarely targets the business/consumer market which every other vendor in this space long ago recognized as hugely important. Still, better late than never. With its innovative user interface, sleek industrial design, Swiss army knife versatility and good-as-ever BlackBerry e-mail experience, the Pearl leapfrogs RIM to near the front of the pack. In particular, it gives makers of Windows Mobile devices a good run for their money.

The new product is so far available on the T-Mobile network in the U.S. and the Rogers Wireless network in Canada. T-Mobile is selling it for $200 with rebates and discounts. At Rogers, you'll pay anywhere from $250 CDN with a three-year contract to $400 CDN with a one-year contract. With support for 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz networks, the Pearl allows international roaming across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

RIM has said nothing yet about a CDMA version of the product, but it seems likely one will be forthcoming.

The list of applications is a long one, headed by the usual excellent BlackBerry e-mail, calendar, phone book and to-do applets. It also includes RIM's BlackBerry browser, an online maps application (which you'll pay extra to use), alarms, voice notes, calculator, Voice Activated Dialing (VAD) and three different instant messenger clients - RIM's own, Yahoo and GoogleTalk, which lets you place VoIP calls to other users.

The Pearl is also Bluetooth enabled - both for attaching hands-free devices and synching with a computer. Both applications worked well and were easy to set up.

I tested the Pearl on Rogers' EDGE network. While flip phone users may find it a little small at first - the microphone ends up a couple of inches from your mouth - it worked well as a phone. Connections were good, voices clear. The e-mail functions are as on any other BlackBerry - fast, sure, easy to set up and reliable. Using RIM's BlackBerry Direct service, the Pearl can monitor up to 10 e-mail accounts (enterprise, POP or Web), each of which gets an icon on the home page.

The browser only works as well as connections and local servers allow, which with Rogers and EDGE is decently fast. The VAD dial-by-name function also worked surprisingly well, even when it had to find names in my rather large phone book of 3,500 entries. That said, I did have to get help from RIM tech support to adjust the Smart Dialing configuration so the voice dialer would dial the correct number of digits.

With the exception of the multimedia and camera applications, which we'll talk about in a minute, there is little new in the way of applications in the Pearl. The most striking and appealing things about this product are its appearance and innovative user interface.

The Pearl is tiny and elegant with a piano black and silver finish. It may not be the next Razr, but by the clunky standards of past BlackBerrys, it's a huge improvement. The Pearl measures just 4.2 x 1.97 x .57 inches and weighs 3.1 ounces, making it easily small enough to slip into a shirt pocket. Yet it includes a good size color LCD and a SureType QWERTY keyboard.


               SureType Keyboard

The innovative user interface features the SureType keyboard, first introduced with the BlackBerry 7100 series products last year, and a tiny, but very effective trackball positioned between keyboard and screen. The trackball, which is brand new, serves the same function as the thumb wheel on earlier BlackBerries.


               The Pearl In Pearl

Just brushing your thumb lightly over it moves the cursor up or down menus and lists and across Web pages. For Web browsing, it's a better navigation tool than the thumb wheel in my opinion. And it's faster for scrolling long lists. You press down on it to make a selection or activate a link.

It takes very little practice to get used to. The one problem is that it's easy to inadvertently move the cursor as you're trying to press down to make a selection.

The top row of buttons below the screen also includes a Back key to the right of the trackball that works the same as the Back key found below the thumb wheel on earlier BlackBerries. And a menu key to the left that accesses context menus.

The phone Talk and Hangup/Power keys are on the same row at the outside. On the left edge of the device is a button for launching Voice Activated Dialing and on the right edge, a button for launching the camera application, plus small Volume Up and Down buttons.

RIM's SureType keyboard technology works surprisingly well. Each of the 20 keys includes one or (more commonly) two letters and a numeral or special character or function in its shift position. When entering text, you can type - two thumbed - as you would on a full QWERTY keyboard. The device uses linguistic software and a built-in dictionary to deduce which letter you intended. If it can't figure it out, it shows you the possibilities and you choose one by moving the cursor to it.

This even works - sort of - when you're entering proper names. But you can always revert to pressing each key once or twice to explicitly select the letter you want. You must do it this way when entering a password, as a security precaution so that password characters don't stay on the screen too long.

The SureType keyboards on the 7100 products were bigger. While I was able to use the Pearl's keyboard fairly easily despite the smaller keys, it is a little cramped and may be difficult for the fat thumbed. It certainly makes for slightly slower typing than on traditional BlackBerry devices with full QWERTY keyboards.

Pearl's screen is another definite plus. It measures about 1.5 x 1.6 inches (240 x 260 pixels) and displays up to 65,000 colours. Menu icons and text show up with excellent contrast, even in fairly bright light. Photos, though naturally very small, show up well too.

Pearl includes 64 MB of onboard memory - not bad for a phone this small. And it has a microSD slot (inside behind the battery) that can take flash memory cards up to 2GB (as little as $100). Even a gigabyte (well under $100) will store hundreds of pictures and low-bitrate MP3s. (There's no point using 120-Kbps files as we'll see.)

The camera is mainly important for symbolic and, of course, marketing reasons. With many makers now offering 2-megapixel cameras in their phones and the odd one raising the bar with even higher-resolution components, the Pearl lags with its 1.3-megapixel camera.

It does include a built-in flash, but when set to Auto, the flash rarely fires, even in low light situations. If you set it to On - so the flash always fires - the device warns you that this could impact battery life. Which of course it will.

RIM also claims the camera has a 5X zoom, but this is really a digital zoom which simply fills the frame with a portion of what the lens sees. If you zoom in, the pictures will be fuzzy - or rather, fuzzier - and pixilated. The best that can be said about this camera is that it's at least as good as other second-generation 1-to-1.3-megapixel phone cameras and better than some. It is decidedly not what makes the Pearl attractive, only what makes it a marketing breakthrough.

The same could be said for the other multimedia capabilities. The idea of a phone that doubles as a music player is an attractive one, but RIM has stumbled a little here as well. As with any MP3 phone, you can listen to music on the tiny phone speaker, but what you really want to do is listen on stereo earphones or earbuds. The Pearl, however, only ships with a hands-free phone headset with a single ear bud (and microphone).


                Pearl Media Apps

Listening on the included headset probably doesn't do the Pearl's music playing capabilities justice - it's not a great experience. The problem is, you cannot plug in a standard mini-stereo headset or earbuds. The headset socket (on the left-hand edge) only takes teensy-weensy jacks of the kind used for hands-free phone headsets. RIM will sell you a set of stereo earbuds that will work - for another $30. Or you can pick up an adapter from Radio Shack for about $5.

As a photo and video player, the Pearl is not bad. The sharp, bright screen is the saving grace here. The trick, as always, will be to find digital videos both appropriate to the size and shape of the screen and processed well enough that they offer sharp images and smooth motion.

Bottom line? The Pearl puts RIM solidly into the business/consumer market while offering the best of earlier products, most importantly the unparalleled e-mail experience. This is thanks to the new user interface, easily up to usual RIM standards, and the e-mail software and systems behind the device, which don't change here. One caution: if you're an e-mail-intensive user, spend time with device before buying to make sure you can type relatively easily on the keyboard.