It’s been a great three weeks testing out the Flip. I’ve really enjoyed playing with the phone and getting the chance to share the reviews. It’s been very interesting to read through the comments on the posts, as well as the posts done by the other reviewers. Overall, I think the first set of team-member product reviews has been pretty successful.

After looking over what I’ve already written and staring at the Flip sitting here in its box, I find myself pondering the question: “So what’s the bottom line?”

1. AMAZING screen. I don’t think I mentioned this before now, but the screen is bright, clear and great to look at.
2. Decent camera. The camera takes good pictures – for a phone.
3. AppWorld. It’s a great way to get things installed on the phone.
4. Applications. The bundled applications, along with the availability of decent applications make the BlackBerry a super-functional platform in any form factor.
5. Email. BlackBerrys are email devices, and always have been.

1. Keyboard. The lack of a QWERTY keyboard is the biggest issue I had with the phone. Talking to people who have been long-time Pearl users, the keyboard does certainly get easier to use the longer you have it. But with my usage (need to key in Twitter usernames, login IDs for websites and lots of strange email addresses) the SureType system isn’t.
2. Battery Life. The battery life was passable, but for something that is notably thicker than many other phones on the market the battery should be spectacular.
3. Casing. I understand that the Flip is geared as a ‘Consumer’ phone, and isn’t targeted at higher-end customers, but the casing feels cheap – a sentiment shared by a large number of people that came by my desk to check out the phone.

The phone is a pretty good entry-level BlackBerry, but the lack of a good keyboard and the overall form factor aren’t for me. Given the choice I’d stick with my Curve.

Since I wasn’t overly impressed with the email functionality built-in to the Flip’s mail program, when it came to Gmail integration at least, I thought I’d come back and talk about something quite a bit more cheerful: running applications on the Flip. The newer operating system on the Flip has a new application gallery called the BlackBerry AppWorld. The AppWorld, at the time of this post, has over 260 applications ranging in price from free through about $50… at least that’s the most expensive one that I saw.

The installation and setup experience is quick and easy. I was able to find several interesting apps to help me through my final week with the Flip. I had the opportunity to play with a number of different apps and explore some functionality that I hadn’t tried on my other BlackBerry.

• Google search app for speedier searching
• WeatherEye to see if the weather guys are right or not (from the Weather Network)
• Snap2Twitter to take photos and tweet them to the world using Snap My Life
• TankAce 1944 Lite to kill some time waiting for the doctor
• HockeyNews to keep track of my Canucks when I can’t find a TV

Having access to the BlackBerry AppWorld is a great step forward from previous methods of getting apps on the BlackBerry. They’ve made great strides in usability and ease of installation, and the new method is similar to the experience on the iPhone , with one major caveat – the number of available applications. The BlackBerry OS is not a new platform for developers, but it hasn’t gained the same following with application developers as Apple’s rival platform.

In addition to downloading from the application store, I’ve also installed the Gmail application from Google. This provides a more seamless experience than trying to use the built-in mail settings as it takes advantage of Gmail’s secure IMAP protocol to exchange messages with the server. This helps to keep the mail on the BlackBerry synchronized with the mail on the server including whether or not messages have been read. IMAP compatibility is something that I’d really like to see RIM implement in future revisions of the BlackBerry OS.

I’ve been a BlackBerry user for the past 6 months or so, and before that I had used a couple of other Windows-based smart phones. The biggest difference that I noticed when I moved to the BlackBerry was that the device seemed to be designed around being a great email tool. All email functionality seemed to be very well thought out, and synchronization with my corporate TELUS email account was flawless.

With the Flip, I decided to point my Gmail account at the device in hopes of using it for my personal email, this is where I ran into my first major snag with the device: Email synchronization.

Up to this point, whenever I’d been using the BlackBerry email client, it was leveraging the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). BES is what allows the BlackBerry to securely interface with TELUS’ internal mail servers. Using BES email is perfectly synchronized and changes in my inbox show up on the BlackBerry in seconds.

With the Flip, I set up my Gmail account using the built-in wizard. Because the email client on the phone is the same as the one I was using on my Curve I expected everything to work the same way. It doesn’t. Because the link to Gmail is working over an older (and unencrypted I’d bet) POP3 connection there’s no way to synchronize the status of messages (whether they’ve been read, deleted, flagged etc). This causes all mail downloaded to the BlackBerry to essentially be a copy of what was in the inbox when the message was downloaded.

I’ll talk about another way to get your email working on the Flip (for Gmail at least) in my next post. But for now my email experience, for personal email at least, has been less than ideal.

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.

I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid display stands that have the new flip on them so that I can channel all my first impressions to the blog. (It’s been tough for a gadget geek to avoid playing with the new toy…)

At first blush the package looks pretty much like every other PCS phone I’ve ever opened. Nice white box with TELUS’ signature future friendly brand.  Looking over the gear that ships in the box:

• Wall charger
• USB charging cable
• Stereo headset
• Obligatory ‘getting started’ manual
• Black (thank heaven) BlackBerry Pearl Flip

The unit itself is very light (likely due to it’s 90% plastic shell) and the screen is very clear and bright — much moreso than my Curve, and even my iPod Touch.  This was a bit surprising considering the size of the device.  It sounds like, from what I’ve been told, the previous generation BB Pearl also had a very clear screen.

The only downside I can see from the initial design is that RIM has not to use the widely available mini-USB plugs for the charging/sync cable that plugs into the phone, and have used a much less common micro-USB.  This means that if I forget the charger somewhere, the cable for my BB Curve (or my camera, USB hub, card reader etc.) won’t work with the Flip.  This is the only blemish on an otherwise stellar first day.

I’m looking forward to exploring the device, the SureType text-entry system and other bits and pieces over the next few weeks.  I’ve already got email and instant messaging set up.  Maybe I’ll even use it as a phone one of these days.

Transparency statement: This post is part of a series of blog posts that I’m doing internally for work, being re-published on my main blog. The handset is on-loan to me for a three week period, and I’m not being compensated for writing the reviews.