After being out of contract for a month, Nadia finally broke down and settled on a new phone. Cingular (or rather AT&T, formerly Cingular Wireless) did not have a single phone that she was interested in. She was hoping for a non-Sony, non-Motorola, camera-less candy bar phone that was not also an MP3 player. Sadly, that phone doesn’t exist; actually, there is the Nokia 2610, which completely fits that bill, but she didn’t seem impressed by that phone at all. For some reason, she likes the truly hideous Pantech C3. If it did not have an antenna, that would have been the phone she got.

Instead, she ended up with the Blackberry Pearl, pictured at left (alongside my AT&T 8525). I’ve played with the phone a little bit, and I really like RIM’s interface. The screen is bright and colorful, and the phone itself is attractive. Call quality is pretty good, and its EDGE-based internet access is speedy. I was happy to see that our site displays well on the phone, as does Google Reader. Google has Pearl-friendly versions of Google Maps, Gmail and Google Talk, which Nad currently has no intention of installing.

The one feature that I really wanted to try out is Push To Talk. Sprint Nextel and Boost users have had this for some time now. Since I’ve always been a Cingular/AT&T customer, I’ve never had the opportunity to use it. I had that feature added to our account, and that evening I upgraded my 8525’s ROM; the new software added a number of apps and features, one of which being PTT. We tried to get it working a number of times and had problems with it. The PTT connection was pretty flakey, and when it did work we experienced extreme delays in the audio. I was ready to cancel the service.

This morning on the bus I heard a beep from my phone, indicating that Nad was initiating a PTT conversation. I answered, and we spoke for about two minutes. All those issues we had last night just disappeared. It is highly likely that we were doing it wrong, or maybe having the phones so close together was causing problems. Either way, it works, and I will probably keep the feature. The one question that is nagging me though is this: is it really worth $20 a month?