I own a Dash. I been very pleased with it, the Wi-Fi function is really useful for me since my school had the entire campus Wi-Fied. I overclocked it and use skype on it with Wi-fi, the voice quality is excellent. I never had a blackberry, so I can't compare, but you probably won't go wrong with either of those.
Blackberry's are great for email and thats about it. They are simple to use and are rock solid. They are also the best in regards to corporate email. If you want alot of functionality, get the Dash. If all you care about is getting and sending your email reliably then get a blackberry.
I'd say Dash cause you can do ALOT more with it since it runs Windows Mobile 5.0, which means you can pimp that thing out like you can with a Motorola Q, ask Mig Blackberrys are great, if you use for business and thats about it. Plus why does people like the Blackberrys so much? ITS USELESS if your just a college student and want something like custom wallpaper, ringtones, and 3rd party software to use. I currently have a Samsung i730 other than its bulkiness, i love it to death, I have an MP3 player, NES Emu, media player in which I have Family Guy episodes, movies, and other videos on my PDA. Plus with a 2GB SD card, the storage is endless.
I've got a Pearl and I really like it. I've heard there are things that you can do with the Pearl (e.g. bluetooth tethering) that you can't do with the Dash. I'd do your research before making a final decision. Personally, I don't see Windows CE as being that great of a selling point. I bought the Pearl because it looks like a phone and you can carry it in your pocket. Plus, there's plenty of stuff my Pearl will do besides email: MP3s, videos, IM and web browsing all out of the box. There's tons of third party software too. I've got Opera and Google Maps on my phone, and that's just the beginning. Oh yeah, check out Amazon for your phone. I got my Pearl for a penny by agreeing to get 6 months data service. All the tmobile stores wanted 200 bucks for it.
I was deciding between the two and decided to go with the pearl. I love it. The only thing is that it is pretty useless without the data package which cost 20 bucks through tmobile. The dash has wifi but it also has the windows software which people have told me is that its slow and sometimes freezes. Since I already had a blackberry and didn't wanna take any chances..I went with the pearl. If you have pearl you can also get this clear film that protects it from gettin scratched. you can get it at www.shieldzone.com
I like a lot of these smartphones, but doesnt it cost a bunch of extra money to use most of the features ie: internet, im etc? I dont know if i'm willing to pay to much for all that stuff. Dont know, might just be me
The Pearl is the perfect text messaging phone. The music function is clumsy, the camera can't take pictures if it is moving and the PDA functions are not as efficiently done as on a true PDA phone. However, given it's size and qwerty keyboard, it is by far the best possible choice imo for someone looking for a neat phone and texts alot.
Blackberries are good but I would not recommend the Pearl. First, suretype sucks - Blackberries with the querty keyboard are better. At the place I work at I had to have 2 Pearls replaced within last week. On one the keypad and pearl button stopped working properly and the other had some weird memory leak problem and when I called T-Mobile the tech said its a known issue for which there is no fix yet.
The Pearl does not have a QUERTY keyboard which would not make it perfect for text messaging. Its much easier to type on the full keyboard then mess with the crappy Suretype or do the double tap.
just because it has a camera doesnt mean it records video... there is no option to record video on the pearl
