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Research in Motion. $399.99 with two-year term; $449.99 with one-year term from Rogers

I was complaining to a colleague the other day that I never got the hang of the predictive-text feature on so many cellphones, and he said the best way to deal with predictive text is not to look at the screen while I'm typing. I was a little dubious, but I tried it and it indeed seemed to help.

Then I got the BlackBerry Pearl.

No, it did not make me completely forget about the BlackBerry I use, the 8700, which has the full 26-letter keyboard. But it was good advice — and it was made better because Research in Motion has enhanced its proprietary SureType technology, which learns the language you generally use to predict your typing better. I found it much easier — when you have a name like mine, it's hard to find a phone that can predict my typing without some sort of learning mechanism.

I mention this minor feature first because it's a good example of the entire Pearl experience. With a clarified user interface and a simpler navigational system, everything seems to be easy to learn. You start playing with the Pearl, and within the hour you've figured out most of it by yourself, without having to rummage about in the manual. Well, almost everything: There are a couple of camera features I had to stick my nose into the manual to discover.

As for looks, the Pearl is a beauty — though metaphorically it's odd that this is one pearl that doesn't come in a clamshell. Like the Motorola's RAZR, the Pearl is sure to attract a significant market by its design alone. It's the size of a small chocolate bar (not even 100 grams), has a smooth black body with understated polished chrome accents, and a colour screen (240 by 260 pixels) bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight. The whole unit sits very neatly on your fingers while your thumb is doing the typing.

It's a quiet kind of design, not one that shouts cutting-edge technology, like the RAZR, but whispers it quietly.

It also has a speakerphone, two buttons on the side that you can program to call up whichever application you want, and Bluetooth 2.0 for wireless connections with headphones and notebook computers. You can read PowerPoint and PDF attachments, and edit Word and Excel files, too (although you need to do this through a third-party application).

The keys are very small — which should appeal especially to women. Of course men can use it too, but I can see the full 26-key keyboard of earlier models to continue its appeal to the larger male fingers. And this is precisely what RIM expects of the Pearl: That it sheds RIM's reputation as a road-warrior cellphone and wins the consumer market.

(The last time RIM tried to woo the consumer market was two years ago with the BlackBerry 7100, which met with a notable lack of success, mostly because it was quite bulky, and its limited features made it look Spartan next to the competing Palm Treo.) And unlike some of Motorola's phones, the Pearl does not come in a variety of bright or even gaudy colours. Ultimately, the Pearl's appeal is that of a serious and understated (if attractive) communications tool, not an accessory.

But if you really want an accessory, it's sitting right there in the centre of the phone: A little off-white trackball that looks like a pearl, which is where it derives its name, and it even glows like one when you turn on the phone. The track ball has replaced the lefty-hostile wheel on the East side of previous BlackBerrys, and aside from making it easier to navigate to various icons, it actually makes it much easier to scroll through documents and Web pages in a way the old wheel could never do.

In terms of features, the Pearl adds a bunch of things the traditional BlackBerry never had before: a 1.3-megapixel camera with a flash, a multimedia player with a stereo headphone jack to play MP3 files as well as MPEG4 and H.263 videos, voice-activated dialing, a slot for a MicroSD memory expansion card (up to 1 gigabyte on top of 64 MB internal memory) and BlackBerry Maps, a new application that sends maps via e-mail and finds maps based on contact information in the address book.

Aside from perhaps the MP3 player, none of this is a silly embellishment added purely for the sake of attracting a trendy market intent on fashionable features that are easily forgotten in a year.

Still, the Pearl maintains a foot in the corporate world. Like its predecessors, it integrates with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino and Novell Groupwise for its "push" e-mail service, and offers up to 10 personal and corporate e-mail accounts. It even features new policy controls so IT departments in corporate settings can change settings for Pearls used in business.

For all its sexiness, appeal and sophisticated features, the Pearl has a few small drawbacks.

One is the battery — RIM claims a battery life of 3.5 hours of talk (210 minutes), and 360 hours stand-by (15 days), which is possible, but I managed to drain about half the battery in an intensive two and a half hours of running through most of its features. I'm not surprised because the Pearl is so small (smaller than most phones with half the Pearl's features), it limits the size of the battery it can hold.

And I'm sorry, despite my greater success with RIM's SureType keyboard, I still find myself hunting around for certain things. I find it distracting when pop-up suggestions appear on the screen when SureType isn't sure of what I'm typing. I still prefer RIM's larger 26-letter keyboard. It's a smaller jump from a full-sized PC keyboard, which I use so much, to RIM's 26-letter affair than it is to the Pearl's 14-key keyboard.

The screen appears to be as sharp, if not sharper, than the larger one on the BlackBerry 8700, but it does present a greater constraint when surfing the Web. Don't expect to read your daily Dilbert comic strip on the Pearl without serious navigation.) A pickier criticism is the Pearl's choice of instant-messaging systems. It includes its own BlackBerry Messenger, AOL's AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but not MSN IM, which is the most popular IM in Canada at least. Sure, you can buy an MSN-compatible IM client for the BlackBerry, but why, when the others are included free?

No, the Pearl is not the perfect phone. But the very fact that one can start thinking about it in absolute terms suggests it's getting close. This is one sexy cellphone, smaller than its competitors and loaded with features that look and feel like they all belong there.

The competition had better start worrying.