The BlackBerry Pearl is a deceiving cell phone. Your first look at its face could confuse you, because the keyboard does not lay out on the typical horizontal/vertical matrix like a tic tac toe board, and there are lots of extra characters on the 25 keys that face you. The unusual layout, though, once you take a few minutes to understand, becomes quite intuitive and productive, because the device's designers have made it possible to fit a full QWERTY keyboard on fewer keys.

The unusual shape of the keys simply makes space for the Pearl-shaped navigation control on the front of the phone, and that navigation control makes it easy to use the Pearl with one hand whether you're trying to find a contact in your address book or a calendar appointment.

The layout of the characters on the keyboard, though, amazes me at times, because despite having three characters on most keys, it almost always gets the keystrokes right. Imagine a key with a D, an F and a 4 on it. That means you should be able to get up to 5 different characters out of that one key (including upper and lower case characters).

What do you get when you press it? That depends on what you press directly before it, and the context of what you're typing. For instance, there's a key with arrows pointing up and down. Pressing that key first gives you the alternate character set, which in this case, means the numeral 4. There's another key to change case; and to tell whether you've pressed a D or an F, the software guesses for you, based on words in its internal dictionary as well as words in your calendar appointments and contact list. Then it gives you choices which you select by sliding your finger over the Pearl navigation key.

Although it's not perfect, it's pretty accurate, and since it's roughly laid out like your computer keyboard, you can find the keys quickly. It all fits in a compact device that's lighter and easier to carry than most smart phones.

As a personal digital assistant, it's a lot like other BlackBerry phones. It gives you e-mail, and text messaging, your calendar and task list, and a bunch of other tools that you'll want to have on the road, including a Web browser, and it has a traditional BlackBerry like interface. It can be an easy upgrade.

At $99, the BlackBerry Pearl spreads the BlackBerry's productivity factor to a broader public than just corporate America.