I love my Pearl more everyday..

I've been a BlackBerry user for a few years now, but when I saw the Pearl announced a few months ago, it was love at first sight. I preordered it from T-Mobile.com only to find out they wouldn't be sending it until a few days after the release day. Like any good geek, I couldn't wait that long so instead I went and picked up a second one on the release day at the store. I've been in love ever since (and am a huge evangelist, persuading at least 3 others to buy one as well).

The thing I love most about the Pearl is that I find new uses for it everyday. For example:

• The ability to browse web pages inside the Amazon firewall.
• The ability to SSH into any box in the world, inside or outside of the Amazon firewall. Seriously, SSH! I can admin anything I need from my cell phone! I mean, really.
  
• Google Maps Mobile. Has helped me find my way many, many times. And adding traffic to it only made it better.
• Yahoo! Go. This is a new one, but it's totally great. I'm mainly using it for uploading cameraphone images directly to Flickr.
• The speed at which email is pushed to the device. It boggles my mind that it's faster to receive email on my BlackBerry than it is to wait for it to show up in Outlook, but it's true.

And, today I found a new feature that kicks ass. In less than 10 minutes -- following the directions posted here -- I set up my Pearl to act as a modem for my PowerBook. If that's not cool enough, it does it through Bluetooth, which gives me all the more geek cred. I've heard rumors of people seeing ~150kbps with this, but I'm seeing closer to ~50-60kbps speeds, which is fine for me.

As an aside: I've been preaching for a while that rather than make online applications work offline as well, just invest in making net access available everywhere. Literally everywhere. This is a step in the right direction for me.

In conclusion, I <3 U, BlackBerry. Don't ever leave me.

Labels: access, blackberry, cell, cellphone, howto, mobile, pearl, powerbook, tmobile