So despite the fact that I am slobbering over the iPhone, Carrie and I are hooked into T-Mobile for another two years, so it's going to be a while before I can get one.

After dropping my RAZR into a glass of water yesterday, and messing it up, I visited the T-Mobile store today to get a new phone. I didn't want another RAZR, as I wasn't terribly fond of it (it was acceptable, but it had quirks that drove me nuts). I decided since I'd just gotten a fat bonus from the bank, that I could afford spending a couple doubloons on a fancy phone.

I ended up getting the Blackberry Pearl. So far I think it's pretty cool. I haven't been able to get email set up on it properly, although I did install the Gmail application, which is working just fine. I also am able to run Google Talk and Google Maps on it, which I dig.

I am going to have to restructure the address book when I get home. The dude at the store copied all of my phone numbers to the SIM card, which then imported them into the Pearl. However, numbers stored on the SIM card cannot be "grouped", so every phone number is a separate contact. This drives me crazy. I figure no big deal - when I get home I am going to sync it with my Mac anyway, so that will take care of everything (from what I hear, there's some kind of update to iSync that I will need to support the Pearl, but that's no big whoop).

I am NOT quite used to switching to the QWERTY keyboard yet - years of t9 have really made it a mindphuck to think about this phone as a "keyboard" - and as Shana and I were discussing, the model is somewhat flawed, because it's not like you "touch type" on this thing. But I'm getting better as I play, so that's a bonus.

I also elected not to get the ability to get my work email on this thing, as the "Enterprise" functionality costs an additional ten bucks a month. If the bank wanted to pay for it, that would be one thing, but they don't - and I'm not paying ten bucks a month so that I can get emails about how the monitoring filter job I ran failed :)

Tags: blackberry, phone, tech