I’ve had a rough time with Blackberry products in the past–their controls are often heavily flawed and their content offerings are staid, boring, and often less than complete. The Blackberry Pearl 8130 is one of the least pleasant Blackberry items I’ve ever handled, and thanks go out to the folks at Wirefly for sending me one to try.

The Blackberry 8130 is a candy bar style Blackberry smartphone that offers a voice recorder, speakerphone, conference call capability, Bluetooth connectivity, mobile web, mobile email, support for a variety of video playbacks, a two megapixel camera with video recording capability, headset jack, USB port, and a battery that yields four hours of talk time on a single charge. It also boasts a variety of specific features like access to the Wall Street Journal, Google Maps, and a surprisingly large array of others.

Folks, I’m not at all happy about the Blackberry Pearl. It’s short on battery life, short on camera resolution, and short on controls. The Blackberry Pearl 8130 has frankly the worst controls I’ve ever had the displeasure of tackling. I’ve had tough times with Blackberry controls before and these were, oddly, the complete opposite of a normal Blackberry. The controls here aren’t too sensitive, but bafflingly, not sensitive ENOUGH. Trying to get this thing to scroll down a menu was like pulling teeth, and the game of BrickBreaker I played was a sad joke.

However, points must be made for the abundant features and the terrific video playback–seriously, they had a Blackberry ad on here that was much smoother and clearer than I ever expected from cell phone video.

SO if you can get your hands around the horrendous controls of the Blackberry Pearl 8130, then you might have found a solid phone here. I had a rough time with mine, though, so my recommendation on this is feeble at best.

The Good

Terrific video

A nice array of features

The Bad

Horrible controls

Low resolution camera

Short battery life

Score 5 / 10