Customer Reviews

BlackBerry Pearl 8120 Phone, Titanium (T-Mobile)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

After having used the 8120 for about a week on T-Mobile, I am generally pleased with my purchase.
The 8120 looks exactly like its CDMA cousin, the 8130 (Verizon/Sprint) as well the other GSM model, 8110 (on AT&T with GPS instead of wi-fi). In fact, other than the new micro-SD card on the side, I can't tell it apart from the older Blackberry Pearl (8100). Unfortunately, the 8120 is currently only available in a somewhat dull gray color on T-Mobile. I would have preferred some of the more exciting colors of the older Pearl.
I have charged the battery every other day, which appears reasonable given that I have used it for extensively for voice and data (excluding wi-fi). I haven't used wi-fi yet (either for internet or mobile calling) but I imagine it will drain the battery at a quicker rate.
As another reviewer points out, the battery door is flimsy and a bit loose. Other than that, the 8120 appears solidly built and rugged.
T-Mobile's data network is not exactly fast, but it serves my purpose. I don't intend to watch streaming videos or download music on my phone. For some reason the browser doesn't display pages with Java Scripts, but that may be an issue with my settings. Setting up email accounts is a breeze and can be set up either using the phone or the T-Mobile website.
All in all, there is nothing to really dislike about this phone, at least for the first time smartphone buyer. Personally, I was looking for a phone to check my email, browse the internet, take decent pictures and one that would fit in my shirt pocket. The Blackberry 8120 delivers on all these fronts. T-Mobile's affordable data plan only adds to its appeal.

Before you begin reading, I would like you to know that I have listed PROS and CONS below so in case you dont like long reviews just read the PROS and CONS and they'll pretty much summarize everything I've written in here.

I got this phone about a month ago and I can tell you that its one of the best phone's I've ever owned. Much sleeker and compact yet just as capable as the curve. Wifi is a BIG advantage because I only pay 10 bucks per month for the unlimited email plan and thats it. No need to pay data fees. Wifi inernet browsing is free and I also IM via wifi. If you go for hotspot@home then all your wifi based calls are free as well, no matter what wifi network you're on!

The calendar/organizer is great and as one reviewer mentioned, it does not update time zones. But thats for a good reason - updating time zones will totally affect your business appointments (they would never get updated even if the time zone would've at all) and so the phone is made such that you have to update it manually and while doing so you'll be sure to change your business appointments for the day accordingly.

The camera is pretty impressive and I recently created a fabulous album containing assorted images from this phone. Some of them are impeccable! The zoom function is good but reduces resolution considerably...but after all its just 2MP so its meant to be only a back-up...say in case of an accident. The video camera is pretty good as well and I've recorded clear, crisp videos with it. I'm happy.

Since this is a PHONE lets talk about calls! Call quality is superb - both reception and transmission. You can talk in the middle of a crowded party and you will still be able to hear very well and your voice will be transmitted to the person on the other end w/o any disturbance due to the powerful noise-canceling mic. I have experienced this myself.

The few CONS of this phone are:

1. Its internal memory is only 64MB, which may be a problem for users who tend to upload too many third-party applications on their phones. I have about 7 third-party applications yet I have 17MB left which is quite impressive so for average or slightly heavy users (like me)memory shouldnt be a problem at all. For photos and videos the OS 4.3 of this phone can support upto 8GBs of external memory (microSD card). I use 4GB and its fantastic...I've managed to fill only 500 MB even after uploading several MP3s and a few videos and photos.

2. The browser is archaic and does not support JAVA apps. However, RIM will come out with newer OS versions which one can install on their phones for free and which will address these issues. Till then you can use free browsers like Opera mini which rocks!

3. Screen is smaller than the curve's (not a problem at all for me) which some people may not like.

The many PROS are:

1. Amazingly light and compact
3. Wifi
4. Heavily customizable
5. SureType keyboard (makes typing very easy but may need getting used to initially)
6. High resolution display
5. External memory expandable upto 8GB
7. Video capture
8. Voice dialing
9. Push email
10. Very nice organizer
11. Two speakers instead of one as seen in previous models
12. New, powerful mic with background noise cancellation

I can go on and on about this phone. I just want to reiterate that this is a very user friendly, highly capable, extremely customizable phone and you will have no regrets! RIM has been making BlackBerries for ages now and they know what they're doing! Over the years they've addressed various issues from previous models and the 8120 being one of their latest offerings, many issues have been rectified in this phone.

Go for it and enjoy!

If you're looking to get your first smartphone or upgrade your existing Pearl, you're going to like the 8120.

This phone includes the Hotspot@Home service, which works on any existing Wi-Fi connection. You don't have to pay an extra service fee or buy another router. It just works. I've even used it on the university wireless network. It's great for those times when I'm stuck in the lab with no cell reception. I just activate the Wifi if I want to make a call.

I have had a few calls drop, but I'm not sure if it's the phone or my wireless connection. Battery life is also a little short, but it's not a dealbreaker.

The 8120 is a great update to the original Pearl.

I recently purchased the Blackberry Curve (T-Mobile),At first i was very pleased and content with my purchase. That was until one of my co-workers showed me his Pearl 8120 which is just a more compact version of the curve. Needless to say,The pearl was as simple to use and just as fast. The issue i had was that the pearl had video caption capability, which the curve did not.The bateries were the same and the picture quality were up to par. With the pearl i didn't feel like i had a brick on my hip. Allin all the curve was returned and the pearl 8120 was purchased.

I purchased this phone not too long ago. This is my first Black Berry and i really love it. It has the same futures as the curve but this one is way smaller.
LIKES:
1.you can put in an addiniotal memory card up to 4 G.That gives you lots of space with music and pictures.
2. Its very userfriendly, i didnt have any issues with it.
3. The camera with 2pix. is working pretty good and the flashlight is very usefull if you want to capture something real quick (it also has zoom), however even with 2pix. this will not replace your digicam.
4.It has WiFi and even hotspot so you can save lots of money and would not need to get a house phone if you set up your t-mobile hotspot and can talk for free.
5. The phone sits comfortable in my hands and i can type with one hand only.
6. It shows me whenever i receive a new email or messege immediately through the red blinking light. That way i will not miss any messeges.
7.T-mobiles Email plan is affordable and very usefull. I dont need full internet (i have this at work and at home)but i need to check my mail. This is the best way to go.
8. It has a voice notes recorder. So when i am in the store and i want to create a memo so i wont forget something, instead of typing i am speaking and saving it into my phone. That makes things so much easier.
9. It has GPS
10. The calendar is very userfriendly and great to manage.

DISLIKES:
1. it has short battery life. That's why i had to subtract one star.
2. the dull color(grey). I would have prefferd variety of colors like (red, blue, pink, black,white or even green)

Overall im very satisfied, this phone is affordable and very compact.
You might have problems typing if you have bigger hands. Thats why i call it the female version of the curve. I dont have any problems with typing at all because I have small hands. I highly recommend it to all the females who want a small compact smartphone with lots of futures.

I got this phone through T-mobile's upgrade service. I wanted to migrate off the Palm Treo platform, but moving my address book and calendar from the Palm Desktop to Microsoft Outlook and the Blackberry 8120 handheld proved problematic. The described process is straightforward, but if you encounter problems...good luck troubleshooting it! In my instance, the phone reboots every time I synchronize with Outlook, and gives an apparently common error code (0x80040fb3) without any helpful explanation: "check documentation." (What documentation?) Do some research on this error code online before you get this phone. Hopefully you'll have a better experience than I did. There are many user forums that mention this code, but it seems that many other users aren't able to figure it out either. The RIM website says an entry in Outlook is corrupt, but I don't want to go through a process of elimination with 3000 entries. With all due credit and full disclosure: Tmobile offered to return the phones, and RIM was able to get it sync with one hand-entered address entry after two hours of troubleshooting. Of course, the problem came back when I tried my Palm database (migrated into Outlook.)

I got this phone through T-mobile's upgrade service. The first unit they sent me seemed to have a lot of problems, so I sent it back and received another one. The second unit had the exact same problems, which tells me that the phone is defective and it wasn't just a bum unit. Again, these problems existed on TWO brand new pearl 8120s, so it wasn't a fluke:

Show-stopping problems:
- The battery cover is loose! The cover does not sit snugly on the back of the phone, and it rattles around when you hold the phone to your ear. People on the other end of the line complained about hearing a rattling noise.
- Wi-Fi interferes with your phone call. I was very excited that this phone could connect to Wi-Fi, but it turned out to be a drag. Any time the phone was downloading data (new Emails, messages, etc), if you were talking on the phone at the same time, the voice on the other end would sputter and lag until the data transfer was done. This could last up to a minute or more each time.
- The operating system is unstable. The very first day I had this phone, I was on a conference call for work and had the unit on speakerphone. A couple of minutes into the call, the phone crashed and rebooted itself! And this phone takes several minutes to boot up, so I missed a lot of my conference call. The phone crashed/rebooted about once a day for the entire time I had it.

Other cons:
- Weak battery life. With mixed web browsing and talking, the battery lasted just over a day.
- Web browsing. Even when using my wireless internet and NOT EDGE, the browser would time-out or stall when loading web pages. It often took me two or three attempts to load web pages.
- Poor choices for ring tones / wall papers / themes.
- Phone feels weak and flimsy to the touch. If you drop it, you can kiss your new phone goodbye.
- The 2 MP camera took mediocre pictures even in direct sunlight. Also, E-mailing those pictures (when taken at full resolution) essentially disables your phone until the Email upload is complete. The phone becomes unresponsive and all you see is the hourglass waiting icon, for several minutes per picture.

Pros:
- Very light phone
- T-mobile didn't hassle me about returning both units when I was very unhappy with my new phone.
- Good voice quality (when not interfered by Wi-Fi or incoming messages)
- The SureType technology was nice for sending messages.

The cons FAR OUTWEIGH the pros. I was extremely disappointed by this phone because I heard such great things about the previous version, the Pearl 8100. The 8120 is flimsy, has manufacturing defects, and is very unreliable. I'll never buy another blackberry again.

Oh. Now I get it. (This is my first BlackBerry.) It's a phone that gets email. Now I'm cool because I have one.

No, I'm really pretty disappointed. Here's why:

1. Slow. Everything is slow, from turning the thing on, to moving through menus, to downloading on the internet, to turning it off again. Slow. S...l...o...w.

2. Mediocre (a nice word to spare the gentle reader from my honest impression) web browser. Along with being, you guessed it, slow, the browser crashes and resets at a mere whiff of javascript. There is zero support for any kind of embeded multimedia. The GUI is choppy and disorganized.

3. Almost no useful third-party applications. No games. Very little interest among crazy "enchancement" developers. What applications there are, all are costly and of dubious quality.

4. Not to beat a dead horse, but really, you can't do anything media oriented with this phone. What's the point of a 3G phone if you can't listen to music or watch videos?

5. No HTML support in emails. Nada.

6. Puny battery. If you intend on actually using this phone for the things it was designed, plan on charging once every 12-16 hours. Yea, about 12-16, not 48, 36, or even 24. Convenient, huh?

7. Only places "wi-fi" calls when in a T-Mobile sanctioned hotspot and wi-fi is turned on. Honestly, what is the point.

What does this phone do well?

1. "Push" email. RIM has put all their eggs (and all the eggs of their excited investors) into this basket. And it works and works well. Hooray. I can now get a longer text messages than I used to. From an email address! Thank goodness for technology.

2. Phone. Did they forget to tell you that a Blackberry also works as a cell phone? Yup. It also does this quite well. Makes AND receives calls. Sound quality is quite nice. Really.

Skip this device and look at Samsung or Apple's offerings. RIM investors, follow this rat from the sinking ship.

This is my first Blackberry device after having a slew of different Windows Mobile devices. I opted for the Blackberry in hopes that I would be able to connect it to a MacBook (personal computer). While I had to purchase third-party application, the device connects easily to the MacBook and I'm able to synchronize my contacts and appointments.

The Blackberry software is easy to navigate and I really like the small size of the Pearl. My only complaint with the device is that it will NOT automatically change time-zones when you move to a different part of the US. You can see that the device picks up the local time, but there's no way to configure the Blackberry to automatically update the time when you're travelling.

Oh, I wanted a Blackberry for a long time, with its huge memory for saving text messages, its Internet capabilities, etc. It's got all that, fine. But what it DOESN'T have is RELIABILITY, and without that, it's not worth much, is it?

This phone is beautiful-looking, and that's about it, and like most physical beauty, it's only skin deep. The plastic back panel is flimsy, and every time I bump it into a wall or a desk (not hard, mind you) or drop it on a soft carpet, and sometimes when I toss it from about 8" in the air onto the passenger seat of my car, it SHUTS OFF COMPLETELY. It then requires a lengthy boot-up procedure that can take up to 4 minutes or so, as the hourglass icon turns and turns and turns. Mind you, this can be VERY ANNOYING when you have to make a call under time pressure.

The key-lock feature often takes a few concerted attempts to make it work, which is also very irritating when you are on the go and have to make a quick call, such as between appointments. My Nokias, while occasionally doing annoying things like all cellphones do, NEVER misbehaved like this lame Blackberry piece of crap.

This gem also occasionally hangs up on an incoming call when I pull it out of my pocket, without me even pressing the "end" button. I just hit some random key by accident (even though I pull it carefully out of my pocket like a fragile little butterfly) and it'll just reject the call. This is NOT a chosen function in the phone's menu, either.

Sometimes, the phone will SHUT ITSELF OFF for no reason, sometimes in my pocket, or my work bag, etc. I pull it out to use it and check messages, and find that it's been off for who-the-hell-knows-how-long. This leads to me missing incoming calls, assuming that the phone is ON like all other cell phones I've ever had, but NO, this phone is fully off, sending all incoming calls to voicemail while I foolishly assume that it's ON because it was ON when I put it in my bag or pocket. Then, of course, it has to go through the 4-minute boot-up procedure while you're fuming at it.

On top of this, when I bought the phone, T-Mobile mistakenly told me they'd initiate the rebate process, but in fact I had to start it online, so I never ended up getting my damn rebate.

Who cares that this phone can hook up to the Internet? My Ipod Touch can do that anywhere there's WiFi, and at work, it's totally free. T-Mobile REQUIRES you to buy a monthly data plan to even BUY this stupid phone, and you can only cancel your data plan after your rebate processes, so they have you on the hook for at least two months at about $25 a month. Not only that, but the Blackberry web browser sucks. It's hard to use, it's tiny, it's slow, and it's essentially pointless.

This "smartphone" has a fair number of user-settable parameters in its menus, but there are definitely things you CANNOT change via the menus, which is annoying. You can poke around in the menus all day and not find a way to change the keyguard code, for example. And speaking of keys, the Suretype texting feature is TOTAL CRAP. It's recommendations for text entries are absurd and useless, and worse than that, the phone will sometimes switch from "Multitap," which is the normal text-entry method found on most phones, to "Suretype," by itself, in-between texts, just because it FEELS LIKE IT.

This phone is EXPENSIVE, UNRELIABLE, and nothing but pure HYPE. I'm NEVER going to buy a Blackberry ever again. I'd try a Palm Trio or similar, or definitely a Nokia again. I used to drop my Nokias on asphalt parking lots (by accident, of course) and they NEVER shut off and NEVER broke.

This thing is total hype, pure and simple, and anyone who's fanatical about Blackberry's has fallen for the hype at the expense of their own reason.