BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (silver, Verizon Wireless)

Pros: Email, Camera, Video, Browser, Laptop Tether, Video and Music Player, AOL, PDA, Bluetooth, GPS, is there anything they missed?

Cons: You need to get used to using this type of keyboard. Also Verizon charges for use of the GPS with their own VZNavigator.

Summary: If any of you are sitting on the fence waiting for the greatest Blackberry ever to be offered by Verizon, your wait is over. It's been 5 days since my pre-order of the Blackberry Pearl 8130 was delivered and this phone has exceeded even my expectations.

First I want to say that I've owned the Motorola Q [both Q and Q 9m just released], the Palm Treo, and other Blackberrys. The only reason I drifted away from the Blackberry in the past was because of it having no camera or video. But I might have become a Blackberry lifer with this one.

If you own a non-Blackberry that runs on Windows Mobile or Palm operating system, you must've experienced the 'lag' or freeze up as you move from one application to another. I thought the reason that Blackberrys didn't have this lag was because it didn't have the camera function that I thought ate system resources. With this phone, I found out I was wrong. I timed myself with pulling the camera out of it's holder and taking a picture and moving to another application on the phone. 2.5 seconds. With or without a camera Blackberrys just don't have that lag or freeze up.

Syncing with my Outlook on my Dell desktop with a Vista Operating System took less than 3 minutes to complete. My Motorola and Palm phones never went this slick. Moving files [videos and pictures, etc] is as easy as drag and drop. As I write this review, I am accesing the internet via the VZ Access Manager that comes with th phone [$15 a month to use this through Verizon].

The main improvement that I love is the trackball replacing the trackwheel. You can move side to side on your Blackberry maps as you are getting directions. You can move down you emails/texts and just click when it when you need to reply, delete, etc.

This phone has made me realize that Blackberry has perfected the cellphone. Now that they have a phone for Verizon that has added the camera and video functions, I'm expecting all the Verizon Blackberry users are going to be moving to this phone. I would've gave this phone a '10' but the keyboard does take some getting used to. It took me about 10 minutes. Because it has SmartType that fills in the word for you, I would be surprised if anyone had any problem getting used to this shortcoming. Besides the phone is more compact because of this feature so there is an upside to getting used to this.

I got the Monthly Modem add-on for $15 from Verizon but this is unnecassary unless you spend more than 5 days or more a month away from the office. I didn't get the VZNavigator because I think $10 a month is steep when you have the Maps already loaded into the phone. But these two draw-backs are hardly any reason not to go with this phone.