BlackBerry Pearl 3G

The basics

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G is a compact addition to the BlackBerry stable. In fact, it's the smallest BlackBerry to date, and it's a slimmed-down version of the BlackBerry Bold 9700, packing in many of the same features we've come to expect from the king of communicators.

The good

The first thing you notice about the BlackBerry Pearl 3G is that it's incredibly svelte and slim, with a respectable 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, delightfully responsive buttons, and a solid back panel. The 2.25-inch screen is also incredibly sharp for its size at 360×400, with great viewing angles.

The Pearl 3G’s performance also matches the Bold 9700. It uses the same processor, has 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS, and is surprisingly speedy for its size and loads pages snappily.

The bad

The battery life is shorter on the BlackBerry Pearl 3G: you’ll only get a day’s use out of it rather than a whole weekend. And not every app runs on it yet due to the unusual screen ratio: useful tools like Google Maps and Sync, Facebook and Foursquare all run fine, but Evernote and PayPal do not.

There’s one other big change – the fiddly 0-9 keyboard. Existing Pearl owners will be surprised and possibly annoyed by this, having been used to two letters per key.

The bottom line

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G is one of the fastest, most feature-packed candybar phones we’ve ever used. It's a great introductory model for those who can’t get enough of the skinny candybar form factor and don't mind an uncommon keyboard.