Our Blackberry 9105 Pearl Review

This is an odd thing. For years, Blackberry has stood out from the rest of the market because of its QWERTY keyboard. Now they bring out a handset that, at first glance, looks like a cheap Nokia with its alphanumeric keyboard. Why?

It must come down to price, and this is a good way to entice new users to the world of Blackberry. In fact, the 9105 Pearl handset comes packed with features, and access to the many free apps on the Blackberry World App Store gives users a load more useful or fun features. The lack of the QWERTY keyboard means that the Blackberry Pearl 9105 mobile phone is aimed away from dedicated business users towards everyday use.

The main strengths of any Blackberry product have always been emailing and messaging, and the tradition continues here. It is possible to add an infinite number of email accounts to the phone, and its nifty email wizard will set up and integrate them for you in minutes. Another clever feature is that deleting a message from the phone deletes it from wherever that mailbox resides, saving you the bother of deleting emails more than once. Its SureType predictive feature is intuitive, meaning that it will learn and suggest your most commonly used words. This can be useful and frustrating at the same time.

The web browser on the Blackberry Pearl 9105 mobile phone works as well as can be expected on a 2.2 inch screen. The zoom control is useful, if not essential when it comes to browsing the web, especially for pages that are mostly text, but loading is greatly improved over older members of the Blackberry family, especially over Wi-Fi. The mobile phone also has the usual dedicated Twitter and Facebook apps.

Also improved is the 3.2 megapixel camera, which features autofocus, flash, 2.5 digital zoom as well as video recording, which produces reasonable results. Video is good quality for uploading to the internet, and the handset has useful dedicated shortcut keys mounted on the side so you won't miss the moment. There are all sorts of features to use after taking a video, with the usual sepia option included in a pretty impressive editing suite, as well as geotagging options.

The Blackberry Pearl 9105 mobile phone's battery life will be a solid selling point, offering five hours of talk time and a stunning 18 days of standby, which is further into the future than most of us can think.

The phone's GPS is quick and useful. Although it won't hope to compete with an in-car SatNav, it comes in extremely handy when navigating a strange town on foot.

The calendar on the Blackberry Pearl 9105 mobile phone does a whole lot more than the name suggests. It allows you to link with contacts through Google Calendar, and there is a wealth of options for alarms, schedules and time zones.

The only thing the Blackberry Pearl 9105 mobile phone is missing is the QWERTY keyboard. In every other respect, it is a great addition to the Blackberry family.

What We Liked

Surprising amount of features

What We Disliked

We miss the QWERTY Keyboard

Our Final Verdict:

This could be the first successful hybrid between the traditional Blackberry and smaller handsets.

Compare Handsets

	Read Review
	Blackberry 9105 Pearl
General
Form Factor	Candybar
Dimensions	108 x 50 x 13.3 (mm)
Talk Time	330 mins
Standby Time	432 hours
Weight	94 g
Quad Band	Yes
Photo and Video
Integrated Camera	Yes
Camera	3.20 megapixels
Camera Flash	Yes
Video Player	Yes
Phone
Voice Recognition	Yes
Polyphonic Ringtones	Yes
Smart Phone	Yes
Internal Memory	256MB
Memory Card Type	MicroSD (max 32GB)
Screen
Colour Screen	Yes
Connectivity
3G	Yes
Bluetooth	Yes
Email	Yes
HSDPA	Yes
WAP	Yes
Web Browser	Yes
Wi-Fi	Yes
GPS	Yes
Music and Radio
MP3 Player	Yes
MP3 Ringtones	Yes
Additional Content
Downloadable Content	Yes
Downloadable Games	Yes
Downloadable Ringtones	Yes

Blackberry 9105 Pearl Full Specification

General

Photo and Video

Phone

Screen

Connectivity

Music and Radio

Additional Content