Saturday, December 23rd, 2006Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Blackberry 8100 Pearl (part 2)

by Shawn @ 7:44 pm · filed under Tech Stuff

Okay, this is what I threw out there in my first post.

Doesn't work great with Macs (you can sync address book, calendar, email, etc. with a 3rd party program, but the program is really buggy and only works over a USB cable and not Bluetooth [yet]). It also doesn't mount in the file system on a Mac, so you can't copy files to it. Bluetooth file transfer from a Mac doesn't work either. It's ultimately a phone, so once you get crap on there, it's good, and it does work flawlessly as an Internet gateway (via bluetooth), which is the most important part.

So I just wanted to clarify a few things after using it for a week or so...

As mentioned above, you *can* sync stuff with PocketMac, but it's buggy as hell and certainly doesn't have the usual Apple polished feel to it. Currently it only works with a USB cable, but they are supposed to be coming out with a Bluetooth version soon (I hope they fix the bugs while they are at it).

It turns out it *does* mount in the file system with a USB cable, but only if you have a MicroSD card installed (I threw a 2GB chip into mine for extra storage space).

Bluetooth file transfers *do* work it turns out, but it's a bit of a kludge. You can't just browse the device file system like you can with other phones... you can send and receive individual files though.

It's a cool ass phone... especially considering you can get it for $50 instead of the normal $400-500 (see previous post).

Permalink