About a month ago, my Motorola RAZR reached the end of its useful life.  The phone seemed to power down after about 3 mins of talk time, even if it was fully charged.  Since I still had 6 months to go on my Cingular contract, I decided to suck it up, pay the early termination fee, and switch to T-Mobile and get the Blackberry Pearl.  A friend of mine works for T-Mo, so I was able to get the phone at no cost with the new contract.  In any event, after an afternoon of using the Pearl (also known as the Blackberry 8100) I'm super impressed.  I've had several Blackberries in the past, and while I love having mobile email, my previous devices were big, cumbersome, and not very good at handling calls.  In fact, I always maintained both a personal phone and a Blackberry back in the day because I so despised using the Blackberry for talking (well, and because my company was paying for my cell phone bill, so why not?).

The Pearl changes all that.  In addition to doing email incredibly well, it does a great job of handling calls.  It's also about the same size in my hand as the RAZR, and actually a little thinner when placed side by side.  And while I'm not a big user of camera phones, the Pearl packs in a 1.3 megapixel camera, and since I have unlimited data for only $19.99/mo, I suppose I might try to make some use of the camera.  The screen is also really sharp, and the Web browser is vastly improved from the last Blackberry I owned (a 7100 from Nextel).

One of my favorite features is Gmail's downloadable app.  While this isn't unique to the Pearl (I don't think), being able to access the Gmail interface from the Pearl is super convenient. 

Finally, and perhaps best of all, T-Mobile only requires a one-year contract, so 12 months from now when there is probably something many magnitudes better than the Pearl on the market, I can go play the field for the best deal

Here's a good review of the Pearl in Computer World.

PS - neither Research in Motion or T-Mobile paid me for this review!