The Pearl

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have, by now, heard that indeed the iPhone was announced and was initially hailed as the single greatest invention ever, dethroning 79 year champ “Sliced Bread“. Personally, I’m more partial to sliced bread. Sliced bread doesn’t cost $600 and doesn’t require a service agreement with Cingular. Still, the iPhone certainly looks to be quite a bit better than my old Nokia, right?

More details regarding the iPhone emerged during the week. Details such as: No removable battery, no expansion slot, and most damaging, no support for third party apps. Ow. And iPhone only comes with 8GB of memory max, so it isn’t going to be able to replace both my iPod and cell phone.

So the iPhone isn’t looking like the phone for me… sniff. On the bright side, that means I can upgrade my phone now! And so I did. After careful consideration, I am a proud new member of the Crackberry club.

I’ve never really understood the BlackBerry appeal, I wasn’t even sure that they were actually phones or just messaging devices. Obviously I don’t follow this stuff closely. During my phone search, I stumbled across the BlackBerry Pearl aka 8100, and it’s perfect. Has most all the features I want (note to Sling Media: please support BlackBerry!) in an attractive and reasonably sized package with a respectable user interface. And it does all this for $600 – $300 less than the iPhone (YMMV) and you don’t have to wait 6 months to get one.