Pearl in Hand

Mothers always say pearls are a girls best friend.

I must say the Blackberry Pearl is rather feature packed. I keep finding new options and settings about a dozen times a day! It’s like having a very small computer in your hands. I can do convenient things like Copy/Paste between programs. For example I was able to copy an address from an email message and paste it into the address book (contacts). And visa versa. I have copied info to and from browsers (I have more than one installed – more on that later). And being able to access other Apps while in one program is almost like using a ‘regular’ computer.

Just as an example of how ‘computer-like’ this is here’s what I Just did. No kidding. A friend of mine emailed me pictures of her family. The Pearl alerted me (I’ve set it up so a tone sounds everytime I get a message). I opened the email and clicked on the link which Then turned on the browser. It loaded the page with the pictures. Cute kid. Well, I wanted to reply that I saw the pictures. I returned to my friends’ email message and clicked ‘reply’. Wrote a short message and sent it off. However, it didn’t go through. I tried to resend…still no success. Oh, darn! I checked the email addresses and they looked correct. I tried Copying the message I wanted to originally send from one of my failed attempts then Pasted it in a new message. It still didn’t work. Then I realized that the SEND address I was using was not the email address of the phone, but instead my yahoo address. My friend had sent the message to my yahoo account. The Pearl can be set up to receive your email from several of your accounts. It makes things very convenient. You get all your mail no matter where you are. (Ok, so people familiar with Blackberry already know this, but it’s a new experience for me). So I decided to send my message back to my friend From the Pearl address. I went to a message that had the phone’s address copied it and then pasting that in my new message. It went through. YEAH! Being able to check the info I needed, navigate around the programs and copy/paste text, I easily solved my little problem.

And Just now, while I was checking the weather in Opera I just got an Alert tone which asked me if I wanted to open the Calendar. I clicked Yes and it showed the appointment I have later today. When I left the Calendar program I was returned back to the Opera page I was looking at. Very nice!

Since I’m on browsers let’s discuss that. The Pearl comes with a browser and with ‘t-zones’ which lets you access ringtones, wallpapers, songs, your account, FAQ’s and so on. The regular browser is actually not bad at all. It’s better than some other cell browsers I’ve had to endure. As I was checking out various sites I came across a PDF and the browser easily opened it. Very Nice! It’s easy to add bookmarks and navigate around. Like a normal browser you can control the size of the cache and clear it when you want. There’s options for security, JavaScript support and many other features. I found it easy to download and save wallpapers, songs and so on. Programs and games are, of course just saved in the phone, but the other stuff can be saved to the microSD memory card and you get to save it in the folder of your choice. I love that I can create a folder just like on my computer. It really annoys me when a device or OS assume I’m stupid and doesn’t let me do exactly what I want to do with my own data.

I was able to download Opera Mini 2.0, Opera mini 3 Beta, Google maps, and Yahoo Messenger from the Pearl browser with no trouble.

APN: wap.voicestream.com
user name:
Password:

Next article I want to discuss the microSD card and how I used it, how typing works on the phone (Love it!!), Bluetooth pairing, using the Maps and Google Maps, getting videos to play on the phone and whatever else I can remember.