BlackBerry Pearl 8100 Smartphone to be launched in India by RIM and Bharti Airtel
Canada-based Research in Motion (RIM) and Bharti Airtel are all set to launch the BlackBerry Pearl 8100, a new candybar style phone in India. The original BlackBerry was the quintessential CEO gizmo. But now, the BlackBerry has undergone a makeover and is targeting the fun-loving youth, with the BlackBerry Pearl 8100.
The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 weighs just 89 gms and has several features such as a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, multimedia capabilities and expandable memory. In comparison, the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 is thinner than the Moto Razr and shorter than the Moto Slvr.
The feature-rich smartphone incorporates the best technology and is a quad-band GSM/GPRS and EDGE-enabled mobile application powerhouse.
The built-in 64MB flash memory of the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 is now expandable with a MicroSD card. Thus users will have plenty of storage space for music, pictures, videos and data files.
The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 delivers exceptional phone quality with easy-to-use phone features including Speaker Independent Voice Recognition for Voice Activated Dialing (VAD), MP3 and MIDI ring tones as well as support for polyphonic tunes.
Other brilliant features of the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 include intuitive call management features such as smart dialing, conference calling, speed dialing and call forwarding. The Blackberry Pearl 8100 also features a speakerphone, Bluetooth 2.0, car kits and other Bluetooth peripherals such as a GPS receiver.
Sanjay Kapoor, joint president (mobility), Bharti, said, “The new device takes away the need to carry two phones — one for data applications and the other for voice needs. The Pearl allows you to amalgamate voice and data applications into one.”
The BlackBerry Pearl 8100 will be out in stores all over India in the next two to three weeks and will be priced at Rs. 24,999. For more information, visit the official BlackBerry Pearl Web site.
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May 7th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Those who intend to buy the Blackberry Pearl with Airtel’s service in India, do beware:
1. Email service on airtel.blackberry.com id is unreliable, as there is “no server” where to push emails from! I bought my Pearl in Dec-2006 and have lost most emails when the helpline tried to re-configure after my email send-and-receive stopped for some reason.
2. Trackball was beautiful, but since couple of weeks, scrolling has become erratic for me. Sometimes, upward scrolling does not work, and at other times, scroll to left fails. If the problem cannot be solved and the instrument has to be replaced, it takes about 15 days (in Bangalore).
3. Airtel and BB support has been poor, whether on phone or email. Calls get dropped, and they don’t stretch to call back or follow up, beyond an immediate and annoying customer-satisfaction sms. “Call volumes are high” is the standard response. Requests get “closed” though customer still faces problems, and if serious complaints are raised, the call is either dropped or you are told that a remark has been raised in their systems (whose wording, of course, bears scant resemblance to the issue at hand.
4. Blackberry Prosumer (tariff) Plan for data can get switched to Rs.899 plan even if you’ve signed up for the 499 one. You’re told to get company approval, though it’s a personal phone. Bills and collection followup via sms, manual calls, automated calls, etc., gets done 3-4 times daily by different agencies … to a point that outgoing calls are cut. It’s happened to me while on holiday with family in Mumbai, for a fault that Airtel+BB committed.
5. Other than for music, ringtones, pic, and video, files can neither be saved from within BB (even if it’s attached to email) nor viewed (when not attached to an email).
More later …
Regards,
— Vinit