RIM BlackBerry 8110 review

BlackBerry is best known for its business email handsets, but the 8110 - also known as the Pearl - is more of an all-rounder.

It has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can connect a pair of standard headphones, and a 2.0 megapixel digital camera with an LED flash. The quality of images this produces is not particularly good, though.

The 8110 is a very pocket-friendly phone. Aside from the Touch Diamond, it's the lightest and slimmest phone here. It has a pseudo-QWERTY keypad, where each key has two letters assigned to it, instead of the three you get on standard phone keypads, and the letters are arranged as they are on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

This makes predictive texting more accurate than on a three-letters-per-key pad, but it takes quite a lot of getting used to. We found we preferred the full QWERTY keypads of HP's 914c, Palm's Centro and Nokia's E71 for quick, hassle-free typing.

The handset comes with Vodafone's satnav package, which is provided by Telmap and provides turn-by-turn driving instructions. It's a subscription service and the phone comes with 12 months free. It's £5 per month thereafter.

Battery life is excellent at 18 hours and five minutes. Email is easy to set up. The BlackBerry internet service delivers push email, so messages drop into your inbox as they arrive, rather than according to a schedule as with POP3 and IMAP devices such as Nokia's N78.

The downside is that, in order to get the email working, you have to purchase an extra £10 per month add-on to your contract, which makes it very expensive in the long run. If you also take into account the poor web browser, which is nowhere near as good as Nokia's, and the slow, GPRS-only mobile data, the 8110 starts to look poor value.

Author: Jon Bray