BlackBerry Pearl 8220

Flip phones, also known as clam shells, constitute the majority of cell phones in use in the U.S. In fact, BlackBerry estimates that as many as 70% of Americans choose the design. The BlackBerry Pearl 8220 is designed to meet the needs of those users who also want the capabilities and flexibility of a smartphone.

Standout Features

• Personal Information Manager
• Flip design
• Documents to Go program
• SureType QWERTY keyboard

Features

BlackBerry Pearl smartphones have been available for a couple of years. They were BlackBerry’s first major leap from the button-down corporate world into the consumer market. Their design is much sleeker and smaller than their more traditional cousins and they were the first to incorporate a camera. The 8220 takes the general idea behind the original Pearls, adds the convenience of a flip design, and adds a bunch of valuable updates.

The Pearl 8220 supports up to ten push-based email accounts, text and multimedia messaging and popular instant messaging programs. It also has a calendar, contact list, task list and note pad. All can be synchronized with the Personal Information Manager, such as MS Outlook, on your computer. But you knew all of that…it wouldn’t be a BlackBerry without those features.

Email attachments such as MS Office documents and PDF files can be viewed in their native formats but with the addition of the Documents to Go program from DataViz many such documents can also be edited. The new 4.6 version of the BlackBerry operating system and the updated BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) support HTML email with imbedded graphics and numerous font and format options.

Like other Pearls, the 8220 features the SureType QWERTY keyboard. This system has two letters per key and programming that does a remarkable job of figuring out which of the possibilities are intended. There can be something of a learning curve when adjusting to it but it works well for most users.

The 8220 has a 2.0 megapixel, 5x zoom camera with flash and also a video recorder. The device has 128MB of memory, twice that of previous Pearls, and comes with a 256MB microSD card; however, photographs and especially video are memory hogs so if you use these applications a lot you’ll want to add a larger memory card. The Pearl 8220 will support up to a 16GB card.

The internal display screen measures 2.25” and has 240x320 resolution so the image is bright and sharp. It can display in standard portrait of panorama view. There is also smaller, external screen that provides the time, date, battery and signal strength but also give caller ID info and missed call info as in addition to email previews.

There is an excellent media player which supports most mobile audio and video formats. Files can be loaded using the included Roxio media manager and the BlackBerry MediaNet program allows for synchronization with iTunes. The phone has a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack and support Bluetooth stereo headphones as well.

Talk time is estimated at 240 minutes while standby time is about 336 hours.