AT&T gets a new BlackBerry Pearl with Wi-Fi

AT&T announced that it will begin selling RIM's fourth edition (and counting) of its BlackBerry Pearl, the 8120.

The BlackBerry Pearl 8120 is almost identical to RIM's other Pearl offerings, with the main difference being that it supports 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi connectivity. Verizon's counterpart, the 8130 is the CDMA/ 1x EV-DO version of the 8110, the Pearl "standard edition."

Like its cousins, the 8120 comes in a 4.2" x 1.97" x .55" chassis of varying color, offers 64 MB of microSD-expandable memory, a 3.5mm headphone jack, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS capabilities with BlackBerry Maps, 2 Mp video camera, and media player. Regarding the BlackBerry's multimedia functions, this week Canadian music vendor Puretracks announced that Blackberry will be getting its own DRM-free music store, which also complements the 8120's Wi-Fi connectivity.

Lately, AT&T's smartphone category has been dominated by the iPhone, both in sales and in media coverage. Despite this, a main selling point for BlackBerry over the iPhone continues to be the former's enterprise-friendly nature.

Blackberries can be centrally managed and supported by IT, currently a problem with the iPhone is its lack of a set of management tools. In an enterprise setting, each iPhone has to be managed separately from other mobile devices and computers. Management systems like AutoTask and LanDesk support BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm OS, but not iPhone.