The BlackBerry® Pearl™ 8120 smartphone is designed to help you do everything you want with your life. It comes complete with advanced phone features, multimedia, digital camera, video recording, Wi-Fi capabilities* and expandable memory.And it offers the full BlackBerry experience — email, browser, text messaging (SMS and MMS), instant messaging, organizer applications and more. Small, smart and stylish.

Research in Motion’s latest BlackBerry Pearl handset, the 8120, sets a new cell-phone standard for delivering business-class e-mail and great multimedia in a small, sleek package.It’s the first Pearl with Wi-Fi support, which speeds up Web surfing and e-mail access. The Pearl 8120 improves on its predecessors with outstanding software for multimedia management and a better camera that captures video and stills.Although the 8120 doesn’t support AT&T’s fastest data network (HSDPA), its 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi capability certainly compensated in many locations. And its quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support means you can use it for voice calls throughout most of the world, with data coming in at roughly dial-up speed in locations where Wi-Fi isn’t an option.

The SureType keyboard layout remains the same: most keys are home to 2 letters and a number or symbol. This is not a full QWERTY keyboard, but as with the original Pearl, those who made do with T9 on a numeric keypad will find the 8120 a vast improvement. RIM, makers of the BlackBerry line, have improved SureType’s predictive text methods and indeed it works even better than the original model (which was by no means poor). There’s also multi-press for those times you’re entering unpredictable text such as a URL or password. Though pretty and shiny, the keys are a bit slippery, making it hard to breeze through text entry. Keys that house numbers are silver and you can use the Alt key to switch to numeric input, though the ‘Berry automatically does this for numeric fields such as phone numbers and zip codes. The Symbol key brings up a symbol picker and there’s a single shift key, delete key and enter/carriage return key. The keyboard is backlit in white and is fairly readable in the dark. You can set the backlight timeout for the display and keyboard and control screen brightness (or let the automatic light sensor do it for you).

With business related functionality still intact, RIM has been very keen to show the new multimedia capabilities in action. Designed in conjunction with PC software developer Roxio, the media player offers playback for most popular audio and video formats, after a conversion via the PC media software that comes with the handset.We were really curious to see how the Pearl 8120 handled longer form video files. To really test the multimedia playback we imported some DivX video files. The Roxio Media Manager software converts the media to BlackBerry-friendly audio and video files — MPEG4 for our test videos.A 3.5mm headphone jack allows you to use your own high-quality headphones instead of the stereo hands-free kit in the box, but the position of the port on the side of the phone may make it difficult to slip into your pocket while you’re listening to music or watching your videos.

Specifications:

Navigation: Trackball, SureType® QWERTY-style keyboard with SureType software (Keyboard), Keyboard backlighting
User Interface: Intuitive icons and menus
Memory: 64 MB flash memory, Expandable memory – support for microSD card
Microprocessor: No
Modem: Embedded RIM® wireless modem

Email Integrations:

• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Microsoft® Exchange
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for IBM® Lotus® Domino®
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Novell® GroupWise®
• Integrates with an existing enterprise email account
• Integrates with existing personal email account
• Integrates with optional new device account

Device Security:

• Password protection and keyboard lock
• Support for AES or Triple DES encryption when integrated with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server
• FIPS 140-2 Validated (FIPS validation)
• Optional support for S/MIME

Network:

• Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g
• North America: 850 MHz GSM/GPRS networks
• North America: 1900MHz GSM®/GPRS networks
• Europe/Asia Pacific: 1800MHz GSM/GPRS networks
• Europe/Asia Pacific: 900MHz GSM/GPRS networks
• EDGE networks

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 6:04 am and is filed under Pearl series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.