Today, I can finally tell you which smart phone you should get. I resisted getting one of these because I didn’t think the keyboard was going to be usable and I wasn’t sold on the trackball. I’d had my Blackberry 8700 for over 1 year and I really liked it. On the recommendation of a friend, I got a Pearl last month. This is probably the most perfect smart phone device I have yet seen. Very little about this device needs to be improved. After about 30 minutes, I decided the 8700 was no more.

Typing on the keyboard is quite usable albeit not as good as with the full keyboard on the 8700. I don’t particularly like the predictive typing but it performs much better IMHO than T9 and some of its other precursors. It’s just good enough that I can deal with it.

The screen and industrial design are great on this device. It is super slim and small. The trackball also works surprisingly well. I didn’t expect that. The fact this Blackberry has a camera and accepts microSD cards are huge pluses and erase some of the only advantages that other smartphones had over the Blackberry. All the Blackberry’s awesome email capabilities and applications are in full force on this device. The essential free, third-party applications on the Blackberry right now are Gmail, Google Local, and Blackberry 411.

If you have a Sony Reader device, please check out my new product called “Readerette Transferrer.� It downloads RSS/Atom feeds and webpages and saves them automatically into PDF files optimized for the Sony Reader device display. This is the first of many new products I will be releasing this year.