BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 (2010)

I really I like this phone – Good battery life, easy to use and it has very minimal to no drops outs. Clearly the best phone I've owned. Even though I've upgraded to one of the newer blackberry models this one will always hold a special place in my heart. Everyone questions while I'm still using blackberry but I'm proudly sticking to my guns

Not an actual smartphone! – Not an actual smartphone compare to another brand, was getting this phone because most of friends and family members are using Blackberry, considering to use the chat application which is BlackBerry Messenger so i give it a try, then after using it for months then its starts freezing without any reason, sometimes the keypad light is off at night, the only choice to fix it is give it a hard reset by pull out the battery.. so tell me, what kind of smartphone is this?? BBM, but there's also a lot chat apps available for androids/IOS.. OS? no good. internal memory? also no good, more like outdated phone..

Excellent – This is an awesome phone, intuitive to use, a great screen, a real powerhouse. Don't let the small size fool you. With a few apps (mostly free) and your desktop files installed you have almost the same function as a desktop computer in the palm of your hand. And still a very good phone. This ia an awesome phone. My 3rd Blackberry Pearl, it follows the first 8100, 8220 but is light years ahead of these. The new screen is fantastic, battery life good (I charge mine every night). For my work I need a phone with a keyboard for SMS and long emails. I'm a big SureType fan where Pearls has 2 characters per key rather than a QWERTY keyboard. Once you adapt to SureType you can really get up some typing speed.

I got this phone as an upgrade on an Optus 24 month plan. My previous plan was $79 month + BB data plan, just over a $100 month. The new plan is $59 so a big saving and huge advances with the phone itself.

When looking at a new phone I thought IPhones have all the apps, i'll just have to do without these going the BB route. However BB app world has an amazing range of apps, all bar 2 of mine have been free. Apps for World Time

(MyTimes), metric to imperial conversion, World Weather (WeatherTrax), Oanda currency convertor. Then if you want to carry your Microsoft Office files there's pre-installed programs "Word to Go", "Sheets to Go" to look at Word and Excel spreadsheets which can be copied across from your desktop.

To make all this work I downloaded just 2 paid apps. File Manager Pro which does a great job of searching thousands of files in my BB and an upgrade of Documents to Go which adds "PDF to Go" to the 2 installed programs. Being able to open up PDFs on the road, zoom in and read often complex docs is a dream.

For leisure there is internet radio. My favorite app is FlyCast and MiRoamer. Cannot get TuneIn radio to stream.

One important point here is for most of these apps to run them via WIFI not the data via the GSM 3G/2G network. Most of the apps can be set up so they only use WIFI. This ensures you don't breach your data limit. Very little