I’ve had a Blackberry Pearl for a few months now and, in general, I love it. It’s a great phone. I love that I can check scores on ESPN and use Google maps and — as a surprise bonus — I can send and receive phone calls and text messages. Here’s what bugs me: The keyboard lock feature is not smart. Like most “candybar” type phones with an exposed keyboard, there is a way to “lock” the keys so you don’t accidentally dial numbers when it’s in your pocket. If you hold down the pound key (#) for a couple of seconds, the keyboard locks. Issues:
- To unlock the keyboard, you push the pound key and the call key. But if you hit the scroll ball, you get a screen with options “Unlock”, “Emergency Call”, and “Cancel”. If you choose “Unlock”, instead of unlocking — which is what you’d expect — it tells you to push the pound key and the call key to unlock it. Okay, yes, I know that. Why is one of the options “Unlock” if it doesn’t actually unlock the phone? Not smart.
- When someone calls, if the keyboard is unlocked it automatically unlocks so you can answer the call. But when you finish the call it doesn’t return to locked state; you have to hold the pound key to lock it again. Not smart.
Those aren’t major bugs, but I wish there was a way to correct them. I found some software to let me change the color of the LED behind the scroll ball, but the only hack I found to change the way the keyboard lock feature functions doesn’t seem to work.
