RIM has put a camera and a music player in a BlackBerry, which for that company is close to an act of heresy, and the Pearl is the most interesting phone anybody has released this month because of what it admits.
The admission is that the enterprise business has a ceiling. RIM’s position has been close to unassailable for years: the mail arrives instantly, IT can manage the fleet centrally, and the security story survives a conversation with a compliance department. That is a genuinely defensible moat. It is also a moat around a finite piece of land. There are only so many corporations, and RIM has already sold to most of the ones that were going to buy.
So the Pearl is aimed at somebody choosing their own phone and paying for it, which requires RIM to compete on things it has never had to care about. It is 14.5mm thick, which is thin by the standards of a company whose products have historically been shaped like a bar of soap. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, which is not good and is infinitely better than the nothing that came before. There is a media player and a memory card slot.
The keyboard is the interesting compromise. Fitting a full QWERTY into a phone this narrow was not possible, so RIM put two letters on each key and wrote software to guess which one you meant. SureType works better than it has any right to, provided you are writing ordinary words in a language it knows, and it falls apart the moment you type a name or an abbreviation. For anybody who chose a BlackBerry specifically because it had a real keyboard, this is a downgrade sold as a feature.
The trackball is the unambiguous improvement and I suspect it will outlast everything else on this device. The side thumbwheel it replaces only moved in one axis and forced every interface into a vertical list. A ball in the middle moves in two, which changes what the software can do, and it is immediately more comfortable to use for long periods.
Where I am sceptical is the media proposition. A 1.3 megapixel camera is worse than the phones people are actually buying for photographs, and the music player is adequate rather than pleasant. Somebody choosing a phone on those attributes will not choose this one. What the Pearl really offers a consumer is the mail, which is excellent, and a shape that no longer marks you out as somebody whose employer chose their phone.
That might be enough. The category of people who want serious email on a device they picked themselves is real and growing, and nobody else serves it properly. Nokia’s N-series does everything and does the mail awkwardly. Windows Mobile does the mail well and everything else badly.
The strategic risk is the one every specialist faces when it goes broad. RIM is very good at one thing and is now competing in a market where that one thing is a feature rather than the product. If the consumer version succeeds, the company ends up building phones against Nokia. If it fails, the ceiling is still there. I do not think there is a third option, and I think RIM knows it, which is why this device exists at all.