Blackberry Pearl 3G

A BlackBerry without a QWERTY keyboard! Whatever next? BlackBerry built their reputation on handsets that were brilliant for mobile email, so what's the point of one with an alphanumeric keypad? We're still scratching our heads.

The Pearl 3G is a compact smartphone targeted at ... um, who? It doesn't have a touchscreen, it doesn't have a big choice of apps, it doesn't have a QWERTY keypad, it doesn't have a good camera or media facilities. It does have Wi-Fi and GPS, but so what? Virtually every other smartphone in this price range has them too, and plenty more besides.

We're left wondering why anyone would want such a phone. OK, to be fair, it's compact and it's got an optical trackpad and SureType to help overcome the limitations of the keypad. But why not get the real deal instead? It's not like the Pearl 3G is a cheap option. Better choices are the BlackBerry Bold 9700, Nokia E72 or even the BlackBerry 8520.

Update: since we wrote our review, we've had feedback from Pearl owners telling us we're wrong (see below for a flavour of these.) Guess what: we're not going to change our review, because we haven't changed our opinion. But there's clearly a small but significant number of people who really, really like this phone. Please read the user reviews below to get a more balanced perspective.