The first thing you notice about the Pearl - apart from its fantastic design - is how light it is, weighing an astonishing 87g, which makes it one of the most portable devices we have come across.

The only down side to the design lies firstly with the flimsy battery cover, with only some slight pressure the cover was removed and this was without using the catch. Secondly the screen - though it looks great - has only a 240 x 260 resolution.

The device gets its name from the 360o trackball which lights up like a Pearl when in low light conditions. For those who have used desktop trackballs the same experience is offered in a much smaller scale, you can navigate through all the menu options easily in true 360 degree fashion.

The Trackball is also joined by the much talked about SureType system which is Blackberries version of predictive text.

Its a love it or loath it system that works pretty well in our eyes, instead of double tapping each key (similar to a mobile) you have the choice of pressing the key that contains the letter you want once and then continue to type as the system tries to work out the rest of the word for you, this can then be selected quickly using the Trackball or you can continue to type and hope for the best. To be honest we used the latter method and were quite impressed at how accurate it was, if you can get used to the system you can type pretty quickly.

The Pearl was also the first device to offer multimedia functionality to the Blackberry range and for a Blackberry its pretty good, when you select the Media option from the front screen you get options for watching videos, viewing pictures or playing music. You can select multimedia content from the internal memory, which is only 64MB or from an expansion card now (supports microSD cards, found under the battery cover), but it’s a bit fiddly as there are several text based options you have to go through in order to select the latter and compared to most mobiles its multimedia functions can’t compare. So don’t expect to see any flash A2DP support or fancy graphical equalisers as its not going to be there.

The Pearl is primarily geared towards business users as you have Enterprise Server compatibility support for Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise. Meaning you can get emails, contacts, scheduling and calendar info pushed to your device. So instead of collecting your email by initiating a connection you are always connected and receive your emails in real time.

For small business/consumers you can use their Internet Solution service, which allows you to configure up to 10 supported email accounts and you also have the Blackberry Desktop software for installing applications, getting media to your device, backup/restore and synchronisation between your PC's address book, memo pad, calendar and tasks.

We found that any emails we sent from our desktop PC to our Pearl were received virtually instantly, it’s only when you have attachments that it takes a bit longer.

On the subject of attachments the benefit of the Blackberry devices come into play, as even though you don’t have any Word, PDF or Excel viewers installed (Documents To Go will soon be available mind) you don’t need them, because when you receive an attachment its contents can still be viewed using its own API. It does not display all information for example Excel Graphs but is does give you a representation of the original document (PDF) and an edited version.

If you buy the device sim-free you will need to get your existing sim upgraded to except the Blackberry service and it will cost you extra per month (prices vary from £5 to about £17 depending on your sim provider). Upgrading was simple enough and we got our Orange sim updated pretty easily. But we recommend you get the device on-contract instead to make life easier and possibly cheaper.

We have to say that though we found the Pearl a joy to use, it's not as easy to get into as say a Nokia device, because underneath all its attractive front menu icons there is a lot of text based control which may put some people off, but it’s designed to offer powerful features without the need for flash graphics.

Also the specification of the device is a real let down, there is no Wi-fi or 3G support but it does not seem to need them as its email solution works fine without them.

You can still do web browsing with the in-built browser and for most purposes it did the job fine, plus you also have push web support to get specific content pushed to your device instead of collecting it, but it may be worth checking out the Mini Opera browser as an alternative to the standard browser.

There is a camera thrown in which is only 1.3mp but at least it has flash support, but for those who like to take videos you will be disappointed as this is not included. To be fair the camera does take good images - which is the most important thing.

The pearl is a lovely device that functions as its intended to do sp, if you want an email solution with style then look no further, the Pearl never tries to pretend it is a technical marvel, but what it does do is provide an excellent email solution for business's and consumers a like.

However if you want the technology you will need to think twice (though Blackberry will be releasing a wi-fi device soon to up the technology stakes).