BlackBerry Pearl mobile phone

Ok, it looks like i may be about to get dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century and go for one of these here new fandangled Blackberry things.

Bored with my Razr V3 after several years and i quite fancy being able to pick up my mail n stuff without carrying something around the size of a mini laptop. I measured a Pearl against my V3 and they are very similar in size and weight.

So, has anyone actually signed up on one of these and what are the deals going?

I suspect Vodafone would probably be the best for me as i currently have a pre-paid Vodafone sim and would like to keep the number.

Have a look at these articles, may be of some interest to you:

Motorola Blackberry rival announced.
Blackberry addiction?

Can someone explain to me how a blackberry is different to mobile that can connect to the internet?

Does it have its own netwrok or something, or is it more/less expensive...do you get charges by time/volume etc etc...?

the big thing used to be the push mail service but the pearl just seems to be like a mobile really (not that I am an expert) - I can also get email on my Sony Ericsson

I don't believe you have to stay with the same provider just to keep your number.. although it could be easier to get it done that way..

OMG, bd, I love you and really mean this: Stay a-WAY from these gadgets! My boss has had more problems than ticks on my cat with his, including it's discharging itself within one hour just sitting on his desk, not being able to receive e-mails, not being able to send e-mails and generally acting up. The theory is great, but if you want to use it abroad be prepared for havoc.
Word to the wise.
P.S. He stayed with his provider (Vodafone) and kept the same moby number.

My boss at work has one and apparently they are rubbish for receiving emails and the synch to mailbox feature is not so reliable - saying that my boss receives about 400 emails a day so maybe her thing is just knackered!!! My advice get an N95

And if you do get a BB make sure that it is new in the sense of unused. My boss' BB that was sold to him as "new" had about 20 female first names stored on his complete with cell phone numbers. Deposit any offers in the dragon's mouth at the Neues Rathaus.

Hell yeh. A friend at work has this. Best phone I've ever seen. Almost the ultimate phone, I reckon they could have made the screen bigger and a higher resolution (480x320 would be good). But perfect otherwise.

Yep, go for the N95. It's the bee's knees.

Don't listen to the doom merchants. These things work fine. The only time I had problems getting mail was in Tokyo. Otherwise, I have used Blackberries all over the place and they are a real help.

Oh bugger, now i'm all confused.

The Blackberry is a great email device. Period. There is nothing better on the market yet. The ease of one handed use, and the small qwerty keyboard for typing emails is great.

The N95 is an all-in-one phone, although it can theoretically handle push email as well. The problems with the N95 are:

- GPS doesn't work that great. The locking times are long. (But mapping software is free)
- The mechanical design of the phone is poor. The slider often comes loose. The phone just feels cheap.
- Expensive (>300€ with a contract)
- Battery life is brutal.
- Limited to 2GB SD cards.
- VOIP is crippled if you buy from Vodafone or Orange. You can flash the firmware, but this voids the warranty.
- Do you really need a 5MP Camera on your 'phone' with 0x optical zoom?
- Contract could be expensive since you need UMTS. Owning this means you might want to download lots from the net. Expensive.

If you want something for business emails, get a Pearl. But if you want a expensive gadget playtoy get a N95.

I was going to get a BB Perl, but after holding one and using it I found it too small for my likeing.
So now I'm looking at the normal sized color BB's like the 8700 and 8800 series.

I prefer the Treo 650 interface over the BB, and I think they look better too

On my fourth different blackberry, and the Pearl is the best one so far.

I have used it all over the world and the only two places it doesn't work is Japan and Korea, but no US phones work there.

The best benefit for me is that the blackberry syncs with your office email. If you setup a calendar appointment on your blackberry, it will sync with your office calendar and add the appointment there. You can also set it up that when you delete a message on your blackberry, you can have it either delete the message out of your inbox back in the office or keep it in your inbox back in the office. This allows me to quickly "clean out" my inbox from my blackberry and only leave the important stuff for when I get back to my laptop.

if you want to type a lot, get the blackberry with the full keyboard, if not, then just get the Pearl.

Hi Jerry_mi,

does the calendar sync work if you're a retail customer, that is you don't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server etc?

I think BD falls into the retail category as indeed will I (I'm seriously thinking of getting one just for the push email functionality).

I am getting a new phone soon and right now it looks like I'll be getting the Nokia E65 which is a regular cellphone with UMTS and WLAN. It is a business phone, has office applications (though I don't really need those), and one of the reasons I am getting it is the WLAN. I will be able to access my e-mail or whatever whenever I am at a place that offers WLAN and many cafés do (for free).
I will also be able to use the Vodafone Live network as much as I want as it is included in the plan I am going to get.

As i understand it, with the BB i don't have to access the net to find out if i have mail, it notifies me.

Just got to work out if there's any way that i can get my work's e-mail system to also notify me?

Customer ( In Office ) to me on mobile call : Hi Dave, did you get that mail i sent you, it's quite urgent?

Dave ( In Beer Garden ) : Yes thanks, i'm just reading it now and i'll get onto it straight away.

Can we see the possibilities people? Hot summer coming up.

You might have to hook it up to work's exchange server. Believe me, if you do you will not be a happy chappy.

Ahh, so you would basically be permanently connected to your e-mail through UMTS (or something else)? Isn't that kind of expensive?

Hi All,

I actually supported (or rather managed the support of) a Blackberry Enterprise service for a UK consultancy a few years ago.

But memory isn't my strong point* and things might have changed.

Blackberry doesn't need packets going to the handset all the time and at the moment doesn't need UMTS (I think it works off GPRS which is a component of GSM).

For work purposes we had a Blackberry Enterprise Server which hooked up to the consultancy's MS Exchange server. The BES connected over IP to RIM's (the owners of Blackberry) service in the UK and that in turn connected to the Vodafone service which actually made connections to the handset using GSM/GPRS. This allowed full Offfice/Exchange synchronisation of Email, Calendering, Tasks etc ... when it worked.

I'm not sure what they provide nowadays for non-corporate customers.

If you want push email from work you could:

- hook up to your company's existing Blackberry service, if they have one
- ask, really nicely, for your IT department to set one up; this is quite an investment, especially in paracetemol
- forward your work email to your personal email address (the one used by your Blackberry) - your security boys and girls might not be too happy with this though.

Regarding reliability my experience is only based on the original handsets. On the whole they were ok, some were DOA but you can get that with any handset. What sucked was the back-end instrastructure. And it didn't suck in a good sort of way.

You couldn't depend upon it. Which is a pity because when a senior consultant or director starts using one they depend on it more than they depend on their PA to tell them they've "been good and it's time to go to the toilet".

Synchronisation ... I'm sorry I'm getting flashbacks again. Let's just say the corporate delivery wasn't totally reliable. Hopefully things have improved although from sarabryd's comments perhaps they haven't.

Perhaps someone has more uptodate information about the Blackberry service offerings, especially w.r.t. the retail offerings from Vodafone and T-Mobile.

Bye now

TPWNN
^{*unfortunately, my strong point is not remembering things.}

I do not know if the blackberry offers e-mail and calendar sync without the enterprise server but I'm sure your local t-mobile rep could help with these types of questions.

My company runs the enterprise server. Most of the people in the office travel internationally a great deal and 90% have a blackberry. There some people who use the blackberry for e-mail and then another phone for phone calls, but now that the pearl is out, most people are moving to this one device.

Is that why you are The Poster with No Name?

Just a reminder. And this may be what you will be facing.

Push email works without a BES server. When you sign-up for a BB service and get a phone from one of the providers it's part of the plan or an option.
Since you don't have a BES server you get another email address Example: 017xxxx@o2.net which you can change later to BDave@o2.net etc. Any Email
sent to this address is pushed to the BB. Depending on the provider they may even offer remote mail retrieval. You setup all your different mail accounts
and the Mail server at the Provider will poll all the accounts every 10-15 min and funnel the mail to your BB. Of course if your corp Mail server is behind a firewall
or in any other way doesn't allow ext. access via POP and SMTP, then it won't work.

I've been using BB's since '99 without any problems - I can't speak for the IT department, but from the user point of view it's tip top.

I have the 8700 now, but looking forward to the 8800 or the Curve with the GPS and multimedia features. 4 of my colleagues in my office have the pearl, and their only complaint was the condensed qwertz, but now they're used to it. I would prefer the full keyboard to keep up the typing speed.

I have heard that the new windows mobile has a push server add-on to exchange - so that might be worth a look. But as a canadian who went to U Waterloo (next to RIM's HQ), I have to put a good word in for my cdn bro's

I too am getting dragged into the modern age, and am looking into cell phones. Can anyone recommend especially good information websites regarding all aspects of cell phones and plans? Basically what general features should one care about, and why (for both phones, and carrier plans)?

I'm also curious to know for how long folks keep their phones? Do they have commonly recognized lifecycles, where continual upgrades and replacements mean that carrier subsidies makes a lot of sense?

For e-mail there is another option. Vodafone offers a plan that has VodafoneLive included, and also your Vodafone e-mail address. You can send and receive e-mail as much as you want for free (it's an UMTS offer but you don't need to use UMTS). The phone I mentioned, the E65 also supports Pushmail btw.

I keep mine two years, until I get a subsidized (usually free) new one from my service provider.

Thanks for the response, Mariposa. Do you get the new one just 'cause they offer it? Or do phones tend to break down around the 2 (or 3, etc.) year mark? I'm completely clueless about cell phones. I ask because I could get a lower priced plan by buying the cell phone myself, and have it pay for itself in 2 years due to a cheaper (ohne handy) plan. Makes sense to me, unless people have some commonly known (but not to me) reason for upgrading every couple of years.

Does a model with Wi-Fi have any particularly useful functions? I can really only think of if I want to connect to a cheap VOIP service when roaming. Otherwise, if I'm in the home network, I think it's fine to simply dial into my Fritzbox and re-route calls that way. Are there some really compelling functions that people like in their cell phones, aside from music and photos, for which I'd prefer dedicated devices?

No all except my first phone are still working.

I had a cheap Motorola that I got with a prepaid plan, which I used about May 01 to December 02. I think it would still work if I renewed the battery but it's so old, there's no point.

Then I had a Siemens, which I used Jan 03 to July 04 (because I moved to the States and it wouldn't work there), my parents used it after July 04 and are still using it without any trouble.

I had a Nokia phone in the States from July 04 to June 05, that I assume would still work if it was a triband phone. (It won't work in Europe, and I haven't been back to the States to test it.)

In June 05 I got a Siemens again which I have been using since. Next month I am getting a new one (a Nokia), just because I can. lol

I think unless you like drop your phone or something (though I've done that before and nothing happened), the only thing that you might have to replace after a while is the battery but that can be done relatively cheap (€20-30 I think). And in the first two years any other issues are covered by warranty anyway. That is another thing that is nice, by renewing my contract every other year, my phone is always under warranty.

By the way, I plan to use my current phone again when I am in Spain because I will be using my German phone and getting a Spanish SIM card that I will put in my old (now still current) phone.

The phone I am going to get now has WLAN and UMTS which is pretty nice (I picture myself sitting at Starbucks and being online with my cellphone, heh). It is a business phone so it also does push mail and office applications but I doubt I'll be using that much (if at all). It also has a camera and MP3 player and all that stuff that most new phones have nowadays. The phone I want would cost almost €400 without a 2 year contract, it would make no sense to buy that yourself just to get a cheaper plan.

You could get a cheap older model though, then it would probably make sense depending on how long you are planning to use it.

Try this site: http://www.handys-mobile.de/handy-ohne-vertrag.html
This is how I got my last phone and will also get the next one (next week or something), and they have very good deals with a contract, I assume they are also good without a contract.
But anyway, you can get a nice overview there of what kind of phones are available, what they can do, and how much they cost.

Buggered if i know what to do now, lots of people are talking in terms i don't understand.

I just fancy a phone that will both alert me and show me my e-mails.

BD my post was a reply to randy, I don't really know how Blackberries work but I hope you can figure something out.

Palm Treo

Try this link.
The phone is free
with some tariffs.
Great all rounder.

I just got myself a "cheapo" SE K550i ( I actually wanted a K810i but they were a little bit too expensive for me) and I was pleasantly surprised that googlemail offer an application to download (which i did) which allows you to access your gmail account quickly and easily (no faffing with web addresses, log-in names and passwords after you have set it up). However, it doesn't offer email push (or at least I don't think so, I only just loaded the application, so not sure) but it is perfect for my personal email account.

The phone also seems to offer a normal email push system but i haven't figured out to configure that yet (but it is not toooo important for me). Does any one know if you can synchronise and download emails from Outlook like you can with the calendar, contacts, tasks and notes? I can't seem to find any settings for this.

One thing to note about the Pearl is that it got the WORST emission rating of any recent mobile phone. Not just a few points higher than other devices but some ridiculous level.