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In a Sea of Cellphones, a Pearl
The new BlackBerry cellphone
Correction Appended
EVERYONE knows that the perfect cellphone doesn’t exist, and it’s mostly because of physics. You know: You can’t have a huge screen on a tiny phone, or a fat battery on a slim phone, or top-of-the-line construction at a rock-bottom price.
But design constraints are part of the problem, too. Packing hundreds of features into a tiny device, in a simple, efficient way, seems to be harder to do than cracking the human genome.
All anyone can do, therefore, is to aim for a sweet spot among the compromises. And today, there’s a new sweet-spot champion, a do-everything phone that comes closer to the bull’s-eye than anything before it: the BlackBerry Pearl.
White-collar types on both coasts have become addicted to the BlackBerry, thanks to its ability to display e-mail instantly as it arrives — and to synchronize with your computer back at the office over the air. Delete a message on the phone, and it disappears from the PC at work.
People with collars of other colors, however, never really saw the point. The BlackBerry’s Tom Thumb alphabet keyboard offers fairly quick typing, but consumers weren’t much interested in a phone as wide as a wallet that doesn’t play music or take pictures.
Two years ago, Research in Motion, the BlackBerry company, took a stab at the noncorporate market with its BlackBerry 7100. The big idea was to slim it down. The 7100 represented the entire alphabet on 14 much wider, easier-to-tap keys, each bearing two letters.
You, the typist, are supposed to ignore the gibberish that appears temporarily as you type, and to trust that by the end of each word, the software (called SureType) will deduce which word you want. For example, to type the word “get,” you press the GH, ER, and TY keys.
But the 7100 hasn’t become all the rage. More glamorous, powerful multimedia phones like the Treo and Sidekick are bulkier, but offer so much more power.
THE new BlackBerry Pearl intends to change all that. It’s determined to top its rivals not only in features — that’s the easy part — but in superiority of design. (For the first months, the Pearl will be available only from T-Mobile; it’s priced at $200 with a new two-year contract. That’s half the price of its rival, the Treo 700. A typical T-Mobile plan is $70 a month for 1,000 talk minutes and unlimited Internet.)
The Pearl’s weak spot, frankly, is that SureType keyboard. The problem isn’t typing speed; I witnessed Research in Motion’s co-chief executive, Mike Lazaridis, churn out text on this thing like a Teletype machine on caffeine.
No, the problem arises when the software misses. Remember how pressing GH, ER and TY produces “get”? Well, guess what? That’s also how you’d type “hey.”
In that situation, you’re supposed to eyeball the row of alternatives that appears just below your typing, and steer the software by highlighting the proper variant. Over time, the software learns from your corrections; but there are still occasions (Web addresses, unusual last names) when you desperately wish you had all 26 keys.
Otherwise, though, the Pearl is a pearl. It’s a beautiful, black-and-chrome, incredibly tiny slab. At 4.2 by 2 by 0.6 inches, it’s much smaller than a Treo, Sidekick or Motorola Q; you’ve eaten candy bars bigger than this phone.
Yet there’s nothing small about the feature list: color screen, speakerphone, two side buttons that you can program, Bluetooth 2.0 (for wireless connections with laptops, headphones and cars), and so on. Some features appear on a BlackBerry for the first time: a camera (1.3 megapixels, with flash), memory-card slot, voice dialing, movie playback and a music player that can keep the tunes going while you work in other programs. Four instant-message programs are built in (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ). And this phone runs on the G.S.M. cell network, which means that (for an added fee) you can use it overseas.
The 240-by-260-pixel screen is so bright it doubles as a flashlight. An ambient light sensor adjusts the keyboard illumination. The voice dialing is very accurate — you can say things like “Call Casey at work,” “Call 800-555-1212” or “Check battery” — and also extremely fast. You don’t sit there, gnashing your teeth, as the recorded voice says, “Did you mean ...eighhht ... zeeero ... zeeero ...”; she speaks fast, as if she respects your time. You can make her speak even faster, in fact, or turn off her confirmation queries altogether.
This BlackBerry talks to e-mail systems just as its predecessors did. Corporate worker bees get real-time e-mail synchronization with their PC’s back at the office. If you’re not a cubicle dweller, you receive a copy of each incoming message on the phone (up to 10 accounts), but you don’t get the wireless synchronization of your mail folders. You can open PDF and PowerPoint attachments, and even edit Excel and Word files right on the phone.
If you enter an address (or choose someone in your address book), the phone can display it on a beautifully drawn map, or give you MapQuest-style directions. R.I.M. says that if you have a Bluetooth “G.P.S. puck” (a screenless receiver), the phone’s screen can even guide you with a scrolling map.
The best part is that, somehow, this extensive feature list hasn’t snowballed into an impenetrable, bloated software mess. The menu structure of the Pearl is brilliantly designed to be shallow and self-evident; everything feels as if it’s one click away.
Instead of the usual, lefty-hostile BlackBerry thumb dial, the Pearl has a pea-size, illuminated white trackball centered below the screen (like a pearl, get it?). It lets you mouse in any direction, not just up and down. You twiddle the pearl to the link or button you want, then push in to “click” it; the lack of a touchscreen is less relevant than ever.
Yet the Pearl also inherits the philosophy of efficiency and step-saving that, on earlier models, made the limited cursor control tolerable.
Just a few examples: To capitalize a letter, you hold the key down for an extra half a second. You can select something in a list by typing its first letter. You can skip the apostrophes in contractions (cant, dont, im); the BlackBerry puts them in for you. If you decide you don’t want an apostrophe — for example, if you really mean “cant” and not “can’t” — you can press a backspace key to undo the change. Hitting two spaces at the end of a sentence automatically adds the period and caps the next word.
Tapping the period key turns the speakerphone on or off; tapping the star key turns Vibrate mode on or off. All the usual calling goodies are present, too: call-waiting, caller ID with photo (and individual ring tones, if you like), conference calling and so on.
To save you even more steps, the text-input method switches automatically according to the situation. When you’re entering a phone number, for example, the keys type numbers rather than letters. When you’re typing a password, the phone switches to the multitap method (where you tap a key twice to produce its second letter).
Yes, there are an awful lot of features, each with numerous clever shortcuts, and that means there’s a lot to learn. But because the shortcuts are so responsive and satisfying, there’s a certain joy to it. It’s not like learning a language; it’s more like learning magic at Hogwarts.
The Pearl harbors a few disappointments, but finding them requires digging like an archaeologist. Some have to do with its carrier, T-Mobile, which is not exactly America’s coverage leader. Worse, T-Mobile’s “high-speed” Edge network gets you online at only dial-up speed if you’re lucky. More nits: You can add a micro-SD memory card to hold your music, photos and movies, but its slot is awkwardly positioned inside the phone, behind the battery. And the battery life isn’t jaw-dropping (3.5 hours of talk time).
Yes, it would be great to have individual keys for every letter; heck, it would be great to have a keyboard, mouse, and 23-inch display. But how big a phone will you tolerate?
In the end, this very polished Pearl is all about the sweet spot; for such a wisp of a thing, it’s an awful lot of machine. Considering how many things it does, and how well, you may be amazed to learn that no laws of physics were broken in the making of this phone.
