m_angle

Just picked up the Pearl yesterday from T-Mobile and it works like a champ---pairing was pretty easy with the car and the phone book transferred without issue.

It is good looking and perfect in size, IMHO. It is not listed on the BMW site's recommended phones, but it just came out on Sept 12th.

Overall, very pleased thus far.

Rudy

Tell us more about the phone book transfer. Did the entire list of contacts come over or is there some sort of limitation?

m_angle

All the contacts came over and there is an entry for each phone number you have entered, i.e.:
Dad mobile xxx xxx xxxx
Dad home xxx xxx xxxx
Dad work xxx xxx xxxx

I believe I have 356 contacts with at least one number per contact, many with three and four, which all show up. Those with email only do not show up.

The phone book takes about 30 seconds, +/- 15 secs to sync once you get in the car.

Dialing options:
1) Dial the number using iDrive under "Dial."
2) Scroll thru your contacts under "A-Z." This option is based on how you set the phone to sort numbers, either by first name or last name, let's say we sorted by last name. It then gives you the option to scroll thru the letters of the alphabet for which you have an entry, so you don't have to start at "A" to get to someone's last name starting with an "S," you just scroll to "S" and all contacts that have last names beginning with "S" are listed in alphabetical order.
3) Go to the "Top Eight" menu and call one of the 8 most dialed numbers you used during this sync in the car.
4) "Redial."
5) "Missed Calls."
6) Voice commands.

The phone itself has a great speaker and great voice recognition software in my experience thus far.

The Desktop Manager software easily synchronizes w/Outlook, Lotus, etc. as do other BlackBerry devices.

Again, very pleased I don't have to carry a phone and PDA. It plays music too, just haven't gotten to that point.

Hope I answered your question about the address book/contacts, please be specific if I missed something, my first time with it too.

Rudy

Sounds great that the entire phone book transfers. Do you have navigation? If so, can you do a "dial name" command with any number in the phone book?

m_angle

Unfortunately, I do not have Nav but want to get it retrofitted... Apologies for not being able to answer that one.

A bit of an aside, but I just saw a post asking about how to dial an extension while in iDrive with Rudy's response. The Pearl lets you add a "pause" in order to dial an extension. In essence, the Pearl will dial the extension for you after your office phone redirect has answered the call and is awaiting the extension. Another nice feature...

PoleApart

I have the BB 8700 and had to install the Hong Kong software to get the address book transferred and now it all works fine. I have nav and voice control but can only assign voice controls to numbers that I dictate. Is there a way to assign voice names to the phone book entries? Would be a helluva lot easier than slowly reading my phone book to the car. :'(

Przemek

dlevi67

I don't KNOW, but I strongly suspect not. To be able to do that, the software would need a "reading"/synthesizing module to generate in its memory the pattern to match against your voice. That's not all that complicated to do, but it's not a function that is used right now anywhere else...

So, keep reading...

(BTW: There is a memory limit of ~1200 contacts/phone entries - which annoys me greatly, as I have more than 2000 in my address book!)

Rudy

Not true at all. The E60 with Nav does, in fact, do speech-to-text synthesis on the phone book entires. (In other words, there is no need to "teach" the car the voice entries or use the "save name" command.) It has been doing so for over a year now (software version wise) which is why I'm curious if it recognizes the entire address book in the Blackberry Pearl...

dlevi67

I stand corrected.

Forgive a man with the old-style media pack (no voice) and original April 2005 software (I think). One more reason to get the voice control installed at the first dealer visit (6 months, according to the car) - and get a SW update at the same time.

Rudy

Maybe they haven't figued out how to make the voice recognition work for the UK market yet. In case nobody has ever mentioned it, youze guys talk funny over there...