The first generation Blackberry Pearl was, by most metrics, a really great phone.

The 8100 Series Pearl had great connectivity options, a built-in address book and calendar,

it had voice dialing and speakerphone functions, it had a 1.33 megapixel camera,

and being a BlackBerry device, it also had a big old keyboard that you could

use to type out complex messages at pretty decent speeds.

It also allowed you to receive emails on your phone, and an upgraded version, the 8120,

had a 2 megapixel camera and allowed you to connect to the web using a simple browser and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The BlackBerry Pearl is an interesting device to me because it's arguably the apex device of the age of the mobile phone.

This device type today often called feature phones, because they were phones with

additional features added on to their core feature of being a phone, they peaked the same year

that the pearl hit the market back in 2006. Why did feature phones peak that year? Because the next year, 2007, was the year that the first iPhone was released.

Now, this is not to say that feature phones completely disappeared overnight.

Blackberry, in fact, struggled mightily in the years following the first iPhone's release,

doubling down on its physical keyboard and mouse cursor user interface, even as the industry inextricably shifted

in another direction toward touchscreens. And the iPhone gave competitors plenty of

opportunity to catch up. It did some fairly impressive things

right out of the box, but the first generation iPhone in particular was really more of a collection

of party tricks than anything truly revolutionary. It didn't have apps or an app store.

It pretty much did what the BlackBerry Pearl did, but everything was software.

The keyboard was not real. It was part of a somewhat finicky and low-resolution touchscreen.

You could call people using the phone app, and there were some games in a calculator built in.

It was very cool, but it was mostly just that. Those were all things that the

...