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Review: BlackBerry Pearl

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Menus Calls / Contacts Messaging  

It is no secret that Blackberries are designed around email, and thus we expected messaging to be one of the Pearl's strengths. What the Pearl and other Blackberries are genuinely good at is reading email, but messaging as a whole is not bad.

Composing a text message or an email is not difficult, but as with Windows Mobile there is no quick shortcut to begin composing a new message. You can start a message from a contact's entry in the address book by selecting new email or new sms from the options menu. It is possible to save a step in this process by using the quick sort to find a contact from the home screen then scrolling to the contact's name and pressing the menu key. There is also a new message dialog in the messages application that lets you start a new text, MMS or email.

SMS messages are straightforward to compose - once a recipient has been chosen you simply start typing. It is not immediately clear how you send the SMS, or any message for that matter, as there is no obvious send softkey and pressing the green send key opens up the recent call list. Send is the default choice when you press the menu key.

Composing a simple email or text is equally straight forward, however the text-only interface begins to impact the experience once you begin sending emails with attachments, like pictures taken with the built in camera. Other than To and Subject, none of the fields are labeled, so it is impossible to tell which field represents the actual file you're attaching to the mail and which is the body with the file name automatically inserted. to make this even more difficult, both fields display the same warning when you try to edit them.

As we said before, the Blackberry is truly designed around reading messages. When a new message arrives, it is only marked on the home screen with a red star on the messages application icon. Selecting the messages application, or the shortcut assigned to a specific mail account will display a list of all messages from newest to oldest.

SMS messages between you and a single contact are displayed as conversations, similar to the threaded SMS client on Treos. Emails are displayed one at a time, regardless of whether they are new or a reply.

 
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