This is the second post in my series of reviews of the BlackBerry 8230.  These were originally written in April, 2009 on an internal blog and are being reposted here.

It’s been just over a week since my adventures with the Pearl Flip began and it’s been a week of exploration, discovery, delight and occasional frustration. I wanted to talk a bit about the text-input system that the Pearl uses.

The BB Flip, like many other small-form-factor handsets has to overcome the challenge of allowing email and texting to work without requiring a full keyboard. Each of the keys has two letters on it and they can be used to enter text into the phone. The main advantage over most standard handsets is that the order of the letters follows a traditional QWERTY keyboard rather than the [ 2|abc ] [ 3|def ] buttons etc.

There are two different input methods, the first is a pretty traditional multi-tap method where you press a key either once or twice to get the first or second letter. The Pearl Flip and some other BB models also employ a predictive text-entry system that RIM calls SureType in place of the multi-tap system. This is similar to the T9 text-entry system that’s found on many other phone models by Motorola, Samsung and others.

My first few minutes with SureType were, to say the least, aggravating. It takes some time to realize that the predictive text continually re-analyzes what you type. Typing the word “super” for example, goes through the following “predictive guesses”. The bullets below represent the top choice on the list after each keypress:

• a
• au
• sip
• supe rmarket – (yes, this really was top of the list)
• super

The key with SureType is to keep typing and not let the predictive text fool you into thinking that the system is too dumb to figure out what you’re trying to say. As long as you stay away from Acronyms (particularly specialized acronyms) it does a pretty good job of selecting what you want.

SureType will also learn as you go, adding in words and phrases that you get it to enter. These aren’t easy to do (like usernames for email accounts) so it’s a good thing that it remembers them. Trying to type in “kdmurray” the first few times to test out my blog and Gmail was quite a feat.

SureType doesn’t work perfectly all the time and it seems to have some interesting word choices which certainly don’t seem intuitive at the time – that may simply be a case of context. It does however speed up typing compared to Multi-tap when it’s working the way we want it to (and you’re using boring normal words). I’ll talk more about the SureType in a later post once I’ve worked with it more fully for a while. For now, the jury’s still out.