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- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 58 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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14 out of 19 people found this review helpful
1.5 stars
"Many Features Far Below Par"
Pros: Nice Color Screen, great trackball, etc (see below)
Cons: Some issues w/ email attachments, music, voicemail, etc (see below)
Summary: First, let me say that the BlackBerry has tremendously improved my productivity. However, there are a few shortcomings that I wish others would have warned me about before I dropped a couple of hundred on this device. Below is a description of each.
AUDIO
I will start with the MP3 player since most people reading this site are likely less business oriented than myself. I must say that I was extremely disappointed in Bonnie Cha?s review for missing this point. The BlackBerry Pearl will not play DRM protected music ? even if you are the owner! I have purchased numerous songs from various legal download sites (Wal-Mart, etc) but the Pearl does not recognize the files once they have been transferred to the device. I called RIM to see if I needed to change a setting and was told that the Pearl would not work with DRM music?even for the rightful owner. And here?s a hoot, in an earlier call to Cingluar, I was advised to download songs illegally using BitTorrent, which have no DRM. Great ?solution? guys!
A much smaller annoyance is a slight ?click? between songs (non DRM of course). It reminds me of the day when folks used to dub songs with tape recorder. A noticeable ?click? would occur at each location on the tape where the pause or stop button had been used. I?m sorry, but it just seems senseless to have a ?click? given today?s available technology.
One feature that is nice is the multiple audio formats the device plays. However, don?t expect to listen to an audio file if someone emails it to you?even though the maximum attachment size is 8 MB. As an internet telephone user, I am able to have my voicemails sent to me as a .wav attachment. Some phone services offer the attachments in MP3 format. For some reason, however, the engineers at RIM designed the phone so that you could NOT listen to audio files that are emailed to the device ? regardless of size and DRM status. Most of my voicemail files are in the 200 KB range.
So, I can download the file to my desktop computer, transfer it to my BB using a USB cable, go for a walk down the street and listen to the file to my heart?s content. However, opening the attachment from my BB email is out of the question. Now the icing on the preverbal cake! I can use my Pearl to surf the web. So one day I surf on over to Yahoo!, enter my email username and password, and open an email with an attachment. Because I am using a device with a relatively small screen and downloading capabilities, this takes several minutes. But I am now viewing my Yahoo! email through the web browser and what do I find? Of course, I can download that same .wav file and actually hear it! Hopefully RIM will learn that users don?t want to spend their day surfing the web to open email attachments. We want audio attachments to open in the emails that are ?pushed? to our handheld devices! Right?
PDF DOCUMENTS
I was shocked to learn of this next problem, especially considering that BB is known as one of ?THE? devices for business users. A few weeks ago while working on a public relations campaign for a client, one of our team members emailed a signed letter that was being circulated by our opponents. I opened the letter, zoomed in and selected ?enhance.? Perfect! The words that were too small became large with ?zoom?, albeit too fuzzy to read. I could even use the trackball to navigate from side to side and up and down. Using the ?enhance? feature cleared up the words superbly!
But wait! I cannot move the document from side to side or up and down. I can very clearly see about 6 and 3/4 words in each sentence?but no more. Apparently, once you use ?enhance? the trackball navigation goes away completely. The question that begs to be asked?why even bother with an enhancement feature if you can no longer move the image side to side and up and down? The bottom line?it is completely useless!
EMAIL
As someone that works with Congress on a regular basis, I subscribe to National Journal?s CongressDaily, which is a very expensive publication that prints twice daily. Unfortunately, when the all-text emails are pushed to my BlackBerry, sometimes two-thirds of the stories are truncated. The messages are rarely over 90 KB. As you recall from above, supposedly the Pearl can receive messages up to 8 MB. However, as one baffled person from the RIM development team said, ??this is completely arbitrary!?
Yep. You are right about that. Apparently, the BB has a random character limitation that truncates messages over roughly 16,000 characters (not words, mind you!).
VOICEMAIL
The voicemail works well unless you have a call hunt feature on your land line or business phone as I do. I love that my business phone will simultaneously ring my cell. Other phones I have used have had no problem with this component. My Pearl, on the other hand, either will not allow my cell phone voicemail to work or dumps me into my cell voicemail immediately when I call my business phone to check messages. When I select the feature ?do not forward when busy? through the options menu, the setting will not save. I have thus far spent more than 5 hours on the phone with Cingular and BlackBerry to resolve this problem. They have even sent me a free replacement phone, which had the same problem. Most $20 cell phones handle this simple task with ease. RIM should have spent many more months in product testing before it released the Pearl. In speaking with a RIM development team member, I was advised to send recommendations to the company?s ?suggestions email box.?
Numerous techs from BB data support have commented that they do not understand why these shortcomings exist. Unfortunately, there are no known fixes available. Good luck in your search for a handheld! I hope this information helps. I certainly wish someone would have discovered some of these issues and posted the information on CNET before I made my purchase. I also wish CNET would have drilled down a bit below the surface. The description provided on its website is a bit superficial if you ask me.
- 4 replies to this review
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great review...it helped me know some of the shortcoming (some of which might not affect me) of the pearl...thanks anyhow...
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I, too, have my biz phone set up to forward calls to my BB. Like you I have experienced the same frustrating problem. I learned yesterday from BB support that the issue is with Cingular. Apparently the brilliant technicians there have disabled the "do not forward" feature for "when user is busy." They also directed me to page 32 of the BB manual which states, ?Depending on your wireless service provider, one or more call forwarding phone numbers might already be available on your SIM card. You might not be able to change or delete these phone numbers or add new ones.?
This is gibberish for, ?your phone is not capable of handling basic call forwarding functions!?
Consequently, BB users like us that have Cingular and have another phone line forwarded can either have no voicemail on their handheld devices or no ability to retrieve messages using the phone to which the other phone is forwarded.
Did these jokers get their degrees from an ?online university?? -
Thanks CapHillDawg. I think I will look into other options to see if they have similar issues.
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I guess the Pearl is not for hard-core business users.
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