Ok, here is a quick, but hopefully information-full, post on the Pearl. I’ll cover syncing with the Mac (iCal & Address Book) and syncing with the PC (Lotus Notes 7 Calendar, Address book and To Do List).
But first, don’t drop your Pearl!
I dropped mine on Wednesday morning while riding every Bostonian’s least favorite subway line, the Green Line. Of course, the reason I took out my phone was that there was a broken down train up ahead and we were going to be stopped for a while. But I digress…
The phone had a “clean” fall — it didn’t tumble and landed flat on its back. And this broke the phone. Cosmetically the phone was still perfect, but the screen wouldn’t light up and the keys wouldn’t work. So I had to get a new phone! T-Mobile charges you for shipping the new phone to you ($15 for 2nd-Day UPS) and, if the damage is your fault, they charge you $100 for a replacement phone. The two times I called T-Mobile customer support and said “my phone is broken” to the voice prompt, I got a very fast response. I have no complaints about their customer support and the fees are high, but not unfair, I guess.
I got my new phone yesterday and spent this morning’s ride on the Green Line setting up the phone the way I had the old one. The software on the phone has been upgraded and the biggest change I can detect is that the contrast between the background screen and the application icons seems to be greater, which is good. A few of the set-up wizard options are different. The phone figured out over the network that I already had a Blackberry configured for email and it asked if I wanted to switch to checking those same email accounts on this new device. That couldn’t have been easier!
Ok, so syncing:
In my first few weeks of owning the Pearl, I was using a Mac, so I used PocketMac to sync with the Pearl. PocketMac is an independent software tool for syncing with the Blackberry and works pretty differently than the standard Blackberry Desktop Software for the PC. Here’s what I thought of it:
The positives:
- Very easy to set up.
- No errors or confusing log messages.
- In general, this is my experience with most Mac applications (if you disagree, try switching to a PC!!). The software knows how to find iCal and Addressbook and you don’t have to do any special configuration.
The negatives:
- PocketMac offers very few synchronization options. Your only option is to copy everything on the computer to the phone and vice versa. For example, with the calendar, there is no ability to control which events get synced, so I had to transfer several years of old calendar data to the phone.
- Conflict resolution was not very clever. On my initial sync, I had duplicate entries for almost every address book entry because I only had phone numbers on my SIM card, not addresses. PocketMac treated each entry as a different person. What I would have liked to have had happen is the phone number from the phone override the phone number in the computer and have the 2 names merge into 1 person. Or at the very least, been prompted on how I would like to merge each duplicate entry. Instead I had to go in by hand and copy each of these phone numbers individually and then delete the duplicate entry and then re-sync.
- Recurring calendar events are not handled well at all. In fact, I would say this is a bug in the software. When you have a recurring iCal event and you have deleted one instance of the event (say your weekly meeting doesn’t happen the week of Thanksgiving), PocketMac does not register this canceled event and keeps it in your calendar. So on the phone, I began to have all kinds of appointment conflicts between cancelled meetings and replacement meetings. (The error did not migrate into iCal, thankfully.) This is a real pain, especially considering the first issue I had, where you can’t specify which categories or dates of events to sync.
So in short, PocketMac does the job syncing your Pearl with your Mac, but it is pretty rudimentary.
Is syncing with a PC better?
I’m now living in Lotus Notes world, so I can only offer an opinion on how the Blackberry Desktop Software syncs with Lotus Notes 7 (the calendar, the addressbook and the to do list). I would say, the software behaves like a lot of PC applications I know: the software was confusing to set up, has about a million little ways to set options, and produced an indecipherable error which took some internet surfing to solve, but in the end the software offers a more full-featured syncing solution than on the Mac. I’m pretty excited about being able to sync my To Do list, since I’ve never been able to use my phone’s To Do list at all. When there are duplicates or any unusual syncing events, you get plenty of dialogue boxes providing you lots of choices. In exchange for the graceful simplicity of the Mac, you get to control everything on the PC.
In terms of the indecipherable error…. I couldn’t get the calendar to sync at all when I first tried. The desktop software reported there was an error and I should look in the error log. The error log said “Internal Error #4238.” Uh….. not so helpful. After some trial and error and a lot of internet surfing, I figured out it was because Lotus Notes was trying to get my calendar off a Notes database on my company’s intranet, which I was not connected to at the time.
The solution: Make sure that your Notes is looking at your local copy of your calendar/email/etc. I did this by specifying my location as “Island” in the lower right corner of the Notes 7 window. How not intuitive is that? Even if Notes isn’t running, you have to do this. So that is annoying, but it works.
Another Notes specific thing is you have to quit and restart Notes for any of the BlackBerry calendar events to appear in the calendar.
And finally, some general comments on the Pearl’s applications….
Josh asked me in a comment on my previous Pearl post about the browsing. It is OK, but in a head-to-head competition with the Treo’s browser, the Pearl takes about 10 times longer to load a page. Maybe that has something to do with different settings between the devices, but I’d say in general it is SLOW. (But when you are sitting on the Green Line with nothing else to do, slow is better than nothing. :) I briefly set the browser to render HTML tables — don’t do that. It makes loading much slower.
The IM interface isn’t very IM-like. It took me about an hour to realize someone had IM’d me on the phone and I forgot to log out because it wasn’t obvious that I was logged in. I’m not so interested in IM’ing on the go, so that isn’t a big deal for me.
The camera takes good pictures for a phone. There is some sort of flash that maybe, sort of works.
The calendar is a pretty nice interface, with a couple different ways of browsing (week, day, month, and a compressed list of events). The one thing that bugs me is that you can’t see the category of each calendar entry. (You also can’t see this easily in Lotus Notes, which is even more annoying, so now I have no way to see personal vs. work related events. I guess I’ll just stop categorizing anything.)
You can pick a couple different “Themes” for your top level device screen. I really like the “BB Dimension Today” theme because it shows you your last 2 email messages, your next 2 calendar events, and up to 2 missed calls.
In the 48 hours I lived without my Pearl I missed it, so I guess that means I recommend it. Just don’t drop it!
