BlackBerry 8100 Pearl
Okay, so I finally found a new cell phone that I like (enough) to get a new one...
The good:
- It's the same size as my RAZR (same thickness, 0.5" taller and 0.25" skinnier)
- Fast internet (speed test put it at 205kbit/sec for me)
- Use it as an Internet gateway for your computer (great for traveling)
- Quad-band GSM (use pretty much anywhere in the world)
- User interface is really nice
- Pseudo QUERTY keyboard
- Nice camera... good quality, decent resolution
- Gmail and Google Maps applications are pretty nice (better than web based access to the services).
- Support for MicroSD cards, so you can slap another 2GB of memory in it (it comes with 64MB internally).
The bad:
- $400 (although with a new contract you can get it for $50 [see below])
- No GPS
- Camera does not shoot video
- 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.
- I wish you could create folders for your list of applications.
If they could just make it work better with Macs (like if iSync supported it via Bluetooth and if Bluetooth file transfers worked), my only real complaint would be the lack of an internal GPS.
Where to get one for $50 (thanks to Julien for this):
I'm a boy... from San Diego, CA (USA). And I don't really have a whole lot else to say about myself.
