With racks and racks of iPhone boxes sitting on the shelves of our local Carphone Warehouse, casting "come hither" looks in our general direction, we thought we'd be wise to check out the competition first. So, here it is in the form of the rival smartphone, the BlackBerry Pearl 8100.

The Pearl is BlackBerry's latest incarnation. It's smaller, sleeker and sexier than its predecessors, looking more like a conventional mobile phone than the previous models. Unlike a normal phone, however, there are five columns of keys under the display window, which have letters laid out in QWERTY keyboard arrangement.

It's also the first BlackBerry to feature a trackball to help you navigate its menus, which works quite well. Unlike the iPhone, however, there's no touchscreen action to be had here at all. For some users a physical keyboard is something of a must-have feature for a smartphone.

We don't agree, though - we found it much more difficult to type using the Pearl's small keys than we did using the iPhone's on-screen keyboard.

The first hurdle a Mac owner is going to find with the Pearl is that there's no Mac compatibility out of the box.

Luckily, BlackBerry does want your custom, so it provides a free download program called PocketMac from its website, which enables you to sync your BlackBerry with most popular Mac applications like Mail, Entourage, Address Book, iCal and DayLite. We're impressed that PocketMac is now free, since we were expecting to have to dig into our pockets for it.

Like the iPhone, the BlackBerry can also handle your media files - it can play MP3s, display photos and play video. Unfortunately the built-in flash memory is a paltry 64MB, although this can be expanded courtesy of a microSD slot. Sadly this is located behind the battery, which isn't a great design feature if you need to keep accessing it all the time.

Playing movies and videos involves clumsily navigating files and folders, and the Pearl doesn't hold a candle to the iPhone's interface, but it's with web browsing that the Pearl really looks archaic. Browsing is slow and painful.

The Pearl works on the GPRS network, which offers speeds of about 2.5G (which is roughly equivalent to a 56k modem). It's a lot stronger as a portable email client rather than a browser, particularly if your business runs a BlackBerry mail server.