I picked up the new BlackBerry Pearl a couple of months ago, and I absolutely fell in love with it:

I always envied people with BlackBerries because of their constant access to email, schedule, contacts, etc. However, my jealousy didn't go far enough for me to actually buy a BlackBerry and carry one of those bulky things around. I stuck with my old cell phone for years, hoping that a high-powered smart phone would soon come around and converge phone, PDA, and MP3 player features into one small device that fits in my pocket.

My expectations were high, and this remarkable piece of technology from RIM really delivered. It's smaller than my previous cell phone, but it does everything I mentioned above, and includes a USB port, MicroSD expansion slot, Bluetooth support, and headphones.

Since 64Mb of RAM that comes with the product doesn't really cut it if you want to store a small library of photos and MP3s, I ordered a 2Gb MicroSD card, which finally came in last week. If you haven't had a chance to see one of these cards, check out the photos below; it's tiny! Hard to believe that there's two billion of anything on that:

I just had to include a photo of the box that the card came in. :)

Having said all that, what impressed me the most was the UI. Being involved in UI business myself, I can really appreciate the amount of hard thinking and attention to detail that went into designing this device. Everything is so natural and just makes sense. The trackball is perfectly located in the center of the device, and it is extremely powerful for single-handedly navigating Pearl's vast feature set. Skins and the overall feature set are incredibly customizable, which is a great indicator of the quality of the underlining software design. Speaking of which, after two months of heavy-duty usage, I've only had one software crash.

Very well done RIM, very well done.