Why I Love (and Hate) the BlackBerry Pearl, Part Four

Okay, so I mostly still love the BlackBerry Pearl—no other PDA-phone combination I've tried out in the past few years works as flawlessly—but I have a handful of complaints.

The camera: As I mentioned in a previous post, the camera has some innovative zoom controls and sending picture messages is a cinch, but I find 1.3 megapixel resolution to be substandard for actual prints, and it would be nice if I could use the Pearl as a replacement camera. In addition, the pictures I took looked washed-out and almost faded/brownish when viewed on a desktop. But in all other respects, including transfer to the desktop, the photo application worked flawlessly.

The music player: I tried transferring with Windows Media Player, which recognized the BlackBerry and transferred music over as it would to any other player. Since this method is buggy at times, I opted to just drag and drop music files using the more literal Windows Explorer. It plays AAC (of the non-iTunes-music-store-purchased variety), MP3, MIDI, and WAV files without a problem, but like many music phones, the volume just doesn't go to 11 enough, for my taste (and there's no equalizer to add bass or other sound-enhancing effects).

The video player: A reader wrote in saying the video player is buggy. After trying it out, I would have to agree. My Pearl came with a BlackBerry promotional video that looks and sounds great-crisp images and flawless sound. But I had problems playing back the .avi and .mov files the Pearl supposedly can play. And the MPEG-4 clips that did actually play back—Rocketboom, two videos by the arty Swedish electronica duo The Knife—suffered from choppy sound. In fact, one of the videos froze about halfway through. The video player needs some work—one big addition might be an actual camcorder. I will troubleshoot this further and report any more positive findings, since RIM claims a six-hour battery life with video, which is significant.

The EDGE network: I 'm so spoiled with the super-fast 3G networks of Sprint, Verizon (EVDO) and Cingular (HSDPA), which are about seven or eight times faster than dialup. T-Mobile still only has EDGE, which is about half as fast (though still faster than dialup-like GPRS). T-Mobile recently bought a lot of spectrum at a recent FCC auciton, so it may well offer high-speed data networks soon, but for now it's a big compromise to go with this phone if you want fast downloading and Web surfing. That said, thanks to Pearl's many other flawless features, EDGE is a compromise I'm willing to live with.

I'm pretty crazy about this phone and have posted many times about it, so check out the links below for the whole story.

Anyone have any other experiences, either negative or postitive, with the BlackBerry Pearl?

Why I Love the BlackBerry Pearl, Part One

Why I Love the BlackBerry Pearl, Part Two

Why I Love the BlackBerry Pearl, Part Three

Why I Love (and Hate) the BlackBerry Pearl, Part Five