FIRST LOOK: BlackBerry’s hip new flip phone

The Pearl Flip 8220 looks like no other BlackBerry you’ve ever seen before, and that’s not just a comment on the obvious shift from a ‘candybar’ shape to a clamshell form. It’s like the Pearl was sent off to some European design school and came back more polished than ever.

Yet ironically, the driver for the 8220 was the mainstream malls of the USA where around two-thirds of mobile phone customers use a flip phone – “and they’re very loyal to that form factor” says Mike McAndrews, RIM’s vice-president of product marketing.

“But we didn’t have a flip phone, so anyone who wants one was walking right past the BlackBerry counter, which meant we were missing out on a big market. The original Pearl was created as an entry-level vehicle to bring new users into smartphone market and the BlackBerry family, and the Flip is the same thing.”

But while most flip phones are super-compact models, all the better to slip easily into a purse, the Pearl Flip makes no such concessions. Even closed, it’s about the same size as any of its siblings in the Pearl 8100 family. Open it up and it stretches out to a full seven inches, long enough to be at first glance mistaken for a phone from a decade ago, if not for that fact that it’s more stylish than most mobiles of that era – and at a featherweight 102 grams, substantially lighter into the bargain. This helps you get over the Flip’s size, although the chassis and panelwork didn’t feel quite as solid as we expected.

While the Flip is a larger or should we say ‘big boned’ Pearl, its designers have made excellent use of all that real estate. The screen is a massive upgrade from the first-gen Pearl: a lush, sharp and crisply-contrasted 2.3 inches. This 320 x 240 pixel panel shows the new look of the BlackBerry OS 4.6 (the same as in the Bold) to superb effect and lets you watch videos in landscape mode when the Flip is held horizontally.

On the outside of the lid is a secondary 1.6 inch display scaled down to 128 x 160 pixels. In addition to showing incoming calls and a clock, you can see the first few lines of newly-arrived emails and details of the currently-playing MP3 track. You can even fast-forward, rewind and pause the music using the volume and mute buttons. The display is neatly integrated into the smooth black fascia so when it’s not active you’d barely notice the screen is there.

The Flip’s SureType keyboard, which is unique merger of QWERTY and numeric layouts, is slightly wider but significantly taller than that of the first-gen Pearl, with elongated keys which are much easier to use. Separating the rows of keys are organically curved metallic ‘frets’, a trait borrowed from the Bold.

But the best design touches are reserved for the trackball and the flip-top screen. To stop the trackball from bumping into the screen when the Flip is closed, it’s been recessed into a shallow crater so that it sits ever so slightly below the surface. The sloping edges of that crater allow plenty of room for your thumb, as does the rearrangement of the four keys around the central well. This arrangement works brilliantly: your thumb is cradled as it drives the trackball, which also seems more responsive to a lighter touch.

And whereas most flip phones swing the screen from a top-mounted hinge, the 8220’s screen pivots around the rear of the chassis using a drop-hinge design modelled upon the Apple’s laptop lids. This also gives the 8220 a less obtuse angle than conventional flip phones. The different ‘fit’ against the face will take a little getting used to – you don’t need to hold the whole phone flush against your cheek, just touch the top to your ear and let the bottom of the front panel sit away from your mouth.

The Flip is also the first BlackBerry to adopt a micro-USB connector for charging and synchronisation in place of a mini-USB socket. This is the new standard for all BlackBerry devices, says McAndrews. “One of the trends we’re seeing in the industry is a movement to standardise around common connectors, and earlier this spring a standard was set around micro-USB for devices such as mobile phones, cameras and game players” which can all share a common charger.

“Micro-USB is also a little more hardy than mini-USB, which is important when you’re always putting the cable in and out to charge and sync the device” McAndrews explains. “The standards in place are to make hardened connectors and we custom designed designed the plug to stand up to all those in-and-out movements. The third element is that micro-USB will allow us over time to get thinner devices. So you’ll see micro-USB on all new BlackBerry devices coming out from 2009”.

The rest of the Flip’s recipe upgrades the Pearl 8100 in several other respect, except that this is still a GSM phone. The camera gets bumped up to 2.0 megapixels, and there’s now Wi-Fi  on the menu (but no GPS). The BlackBerry OS 4.6 brings an elegant interface, HTML email, the ability to read Microsoft Office document attachments plus highly capable music and video playback. Everything else we raved about in OS 4.6 in our review of the BlackBerry Bold applies here.

If only the 312MHz processor could also have been upgraded, because the UI seemed a little on the sluggish side.

David Flynn visited RIM headquarters in Waterloo, Canada as a guest of RIM