They're All Smart Phones, but With Different Types of Intelligence

The BlackBerry's ingeniously miniaturized keyboard, in which two letters appear on each key and the software figures out what your key presses would most likely spell, worked poorly for any extended data entry. Research in Motion seems militantly opposed to simplifying its device's interface: No task is too simple to have irrelevant menu choices or are-you-sure? prompts thrown in its way. Synchronization was sluggish, and few extra programs are available for the Pearl.

Nokia's keyboard was wonderfully roomy, but its Symbian operating system ran sluggishly, with brief but aggravating waits when switching between programs. And Nokia's desktop software was downright grotesque.

As a Web browser, the Dash and the Nokia each stood apart. The Dash could connect both via T-Mobile's relatively slow EDGE data service and much faster WiFi wireless networks. And its miniature version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer did a decent job of displaying Web sites as they'd look on a "real" computer.

The Nokia's browser did better yet, incorporating a crafty solution to the problem of having to scroll around pages that don't fit on its screen: It pops up a transparent overlay that shows a miniature version of the page, with the part that you're viewing set off in a red outline.

The Treo's Web browser is better suited to pages written for its smaller size; it can display full-size sites, but you wouldn't want to spend much time doing so. The BlackBerry's browser, meanwhile, can do almost everything the Treo's can, but looks a lot uglier in the process.

As an e-mail reader, consider the Treo, followed by Dash or Nokia-- not the BlackBerry. The BlackBerry may have the reputation of being the chosen mail device of the ruling class, but it stumbled with home e-mail accounts. Setting up the Pearl to check one required calling T-Mobile for help -- the phone's software wouldn't go to the special Web page where I was supposed to enter the account info. Turning off incoming mail delivery takes too many steps, and messages that weren't plain text often showed up garbled.

The Treo, meanwhile, comes preset with configuration info for many popular mail services; all you need to do is key in your user name and password. You can check your mail as often or as rarely as you like, and messages show up with their formatting intact.

The Dash and the Nokia took more work to configure than the Treo but still functioned better than the BlackBerry.

As a multimedia player, the Dash just beats the Treo. It has a higher-resolution camera and more capable photo-viewing software, while its Windows Media Player software takes less work to synchronize with a computer's music collection than the Treo's Pocket Tunes.

The Treo, on the other hand, doesn't make you remove the battery cover to get at its storage-card slot: it's right on the side, behind a plastic flap. The Treo was also the only device in this group to use standard-size SD Cards.

The Nokia lacks a camera and conceals its memory-card slot under the battery cover. The Pearl does include a pretty good camera and music-playback software, but it makes it even harder to add a memory card full of MP3 files -- the card slot is under the battery itself.

Of all these phones, the Dash feels closest to any sort of universal competence -- but maybe that's just because Microsoft has put so much more effort into improving its software over the past few years.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.