BlackBerry Pearl 8120 review

For a long time now RIM has been trying to appeal to 'get down' with real people as well as its traditional audience of people in business suits. With its most recent handsets, such as the Bold 9000 and the BlackBerry Storm, it's pretty much succeeded but the process actually started nearly two years ago with the BlackBerry Pearl.

This slimmed down the BlackBerry's traditional bulky shape to a 'candybar' design, immediately making using a BlackBerry more appealing for people with jeans rather than just jacket pockets. A few months later RIM improved the formula further, releasing the BlackBerry Pearl 8110 and 8120, which we're reviewing here. These two handsets were identical except that the former has GPS but no Wi-Fi, and the latter has Wi-Fi but no GPS!

When BlackBerrys were still primarily business devices, they used to be the preserve of expensive business tariffs – but not any more – you can pick now suitable BlackBerry plans offered by leading mobile operators in India in the prepaid or postpaid mode.

Of course if you need hardware GPS on your device then already the Pearl 8120 isn't the handset for you. Bear in mind though that you do get Google Maps preinstalled, which supports the 'My Location' feature, which will pinpoint you between 500 and 5,000 metres using network triangulation – and normally it's at the lower end of that.

The candybar shaped phone measures 107x50x14mm and weighs in at only 90g, making it perfectly pocketable – it's a BlackBerry that you won't mind taking out with you in an evening.

The design is appealing, with a fetching indigo finish, and silver strips running down the side and surrounding the central scroll wheel mechanism. Down the left hand side you’ll find a full size 3.5mm headphone socket, which makes it possible to use your favourite headphones. You'll also find a cover for the external SD card slot – enabling you to add and remove memory without having to take the battery out. It also means you can up to 8GB of memory to the 64Mb on board – good for a fair few tunes and videos.

Beneath this you'll find a button to activate the Voice Dialling facility – this can be useful for certain business users, but we found we kept hitting it accidently – activating an irritating American accented woman asking us to 'say a command' – at least you can set the key up to act as a shortcut for whatever you prefer.

Down the right side you'll find volume up and beneath, a button that gives you direct access to the camera – we can’t really complain about it only having two megapixels or resolution – as that doesn’t seem to have done the iPhone any harm – but quality is merely average.  The camera has a portrait mirror and a Flash anyway, so it’s already outdoing Apple – and that before we mention the ability to record 240x180 resolution video.

The display on the 8120 is 320x240 pixels, which does feel a little limited by the standard of many recent smartphones, but it's not too bad. The display colours are not that vibrant though, and the icons not as sharp as the very best of what you can get these days.

At the top of the main screen, you'll find a fairly busy section at the top, displaying info such as the time, date, network, signal strength, sound indicator and how many unread emails you have. A number of icons run down the left hand side screen, providing easy access to the browser, email inboxes, and BlackBerry Maps application. Beneath this is the menu button that provides access to the rest of the options and applications. Moving round these icons is easy thanks to the central roller-ball – the Pearl from which the range gets its name.

Google Maps will prompt you to upgrade to the latest Google Latitude enabled version on first launch and a custom BlackBerry Facebook app is also preinstalled. You’ll also find useful apps such as a Voice recorder, calendar and calculator and a memopad –all pretty standard as well as some cute games such as Sodoku and BrickBreaker.

A potential issue on the BlackBerry 8120 though is the keyboard. Being a BlackBerry, it offers a full QWERTY layout, but RIM has squeezed this into a small form factor by having multiple letters per key. One can use SureType – which is the BlackBerry's version of T9 text entry, but based on the QWERTY layout. It did take me a while to get used to having a QWERTY rather than alphabetised layout and this slowed me at first – but it is something you'd get use to.

We found connecting to the Wi-Fi network straightforward enough and it worked first time. As you'd expect, email was simple to set up, and just by entering our Gmail details it pulled down our emails without having to add any techy details.

Browsing the internet via the browser was fine, but not quite up to serious smartphones – it lacks the screen size, resolution or touch screen ability, which makes it feel rather dated coming from an iPhone. When not on Wi-Fi it also lacks speed as the Pearl is limited to EDGE support, making browsing slightly sluggish compared to 3G handsets.

Battery life is very good however. With light use - checking emails, some browsing and a couple of calls  - it lasted for four days, before running low. Even with heavier use, you should still only have to plug in every two days.

Overall then, the BlackBerry Pearl 8120 is a very pleasant to use phone. It can’t compete with serious smartphone for web browsing but it can have a good go at that and general multimedia – all while being a serious email tool.