Goodbye, Samsung SCH-U740! Hello, BlackBerry Pearl!

I couldn’t help it! The frustration grew and grew. While the Samsung SCH-U740 arouses curiousities…a “crowd pleaser” if you will…I had a hard time warming up to the phone.

My main concern initially was whether or not I would be able to effectively use the “cramped” QWERTY keyboard. I have large hands; but the only character I had issues with was the “P”, which is located near a raised lump in the phone. The keyboard definitely caters to obsessed IMers. I hated the fact that I couldn’t find the parenthesis buttons. I like using smileys.

Using the Internet browser proved frustrating as well. I wasn’t a big fan of the Verizon’s VCast. Page downloads were relatively slow, and downloading images or other large files is slow. And many times, I received an “insufficient memory for this operation” message while trying to browse “busy” sites or download large files. Unfortunately, a MicroSD card does not fix this issue.

The battery was an issue for me. My previous phone, a Nokia 6682, had excellent battery life. I had to charge the Samsung everyday…and charging was slow. An overnight charged seemed necesary to go from one bar to a full 4-bar power supply.

Finally, my phone would turn itself off on occasion. I narrowed it down to a couple of reasons. If you close the phone with the authority of uber agent, Arie Gold, don’t be surprised to find that your phone is off after awhile. The issue also became a nuisance mid-text if my SCH-U740 had 2 bars on the battery gauge or less. While it never dropped a call, I lost the ability to IM…about 25% of the time when battery power was half or less.

If you want to attract attention with a mobile device or IM ur BBF, this phone will do that. But if you’re searching for something to replace your smartphone, step away from the Samsung.

BlackBerry Pearl 8100
If you are into candybar phones, this one is just pretty. I can hear Chris Tucker now…”DAAAAAAAAAAMN!”. Effortless email, integrated Wi-Fi, music player, and expandable memory up to 2GB via MicroSD feed the desires of both regular and business consumers alike.

While I haven’t had but a day to play with its features, the Pearl has more than I need. It took me several hours to get used to the 2-character QWERTY keyboard and the auto-text, which I’ve never used in the past. And after reading several reviews of this phone, I have a few other observations.

The 1.3-megapixel camera takes extremely crisp and clean pictures. I’ve already had several of my friends remark at the photos I’ve sent them via MMS. However, this requires that you have excellent lighting. Let’s just say that pictures in the dark exposes a noticable circle on your subject from the flash rather than more evenly dispersed lighting. That being said, there’s not much to complain about in this category.

The ringer volume leaves alot to be desired. It is not very loud. This is an issue for me particularly while in my car. I like to listen to my music or sports talk pretty loud. However even with the radio off, the phone is barely audible when the phone is on the “high” volume setting. And I’d rate the road noise in my car as pretty average. The quick solution to this is to use the “Vibrate+Tone” option in your phone’s profile. I keep my phone in one of my cupholders, and the noise generated from the phone shaking against the plastic is louder than the ringer.

Finally, just about every review I read mentioned an issue that has since been fixed…at least on my phone it has. The complaint was that the trackball silences the ringer when moved. For instance, if you have the phone in your pocket and pull it out, the ringer goes silent. That is no longer the case.

Here are some other third-party applications that can be used with the Pearl (taken from Wikipedia):

• Beyond411 (formerly Berry411) is one of the most popular Blackberry applications. It allows for yellow pages/white pages searches in any location, amongst other features. It is also freeware.
• Color Your Trackball: allows for six different color settings for the trackball, as well as a setting for cycling through all six colors. All colors as well as cycling can be set to “never” timeout.
• Opera Mini is a third-party web browser compatible with the Blackberry that allows browsing to normally unbrowsable sites such as MySpace.
• Google makes a Gmailâ„¢ application with most of the features of the web-based version. It is available at http://mobile.google.com. There you’ll also find Google’s mapping application.
• Google Talk is specifically for Blackberry devices. BlackBerry users with a Gmailâ„¢ username and password can send and receive instant messages using Google Talk.

After I spend some time with my new toy, I’ll be back to share my thoughts. So far, so good.

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