We all know that IT folks love the berries for their unbeatable corporate setup, deployment and management. The Blackberry platform is a powerhouse of IT integration. But when RIM realized that they captured the interest of Joey Twentysomething (J Crew cashier and weekend club DJ) and his GMail account – they dove into cooler looking devices with more consumer-focused features. Like a camera… and… some mapping programs…. and……. um…. oh yeah, a barebones mp3 player.

You can’t knock the Pearl’s design. It looks spectacular, and once it’s set up, it’s relatively easy to use. But setup – there’s the rub. Being their most consumer-focused phone to date, you’d think RIM would take everything they learned over the years and create a consumer-friendly layer of setup in addition to all the corporate setup capabilities. Well they tried. But when we recently moved my wife over to Cingular (sorry, AT&T, the company formally known as Cingular, the company formally known as AT&T) and a Pearl, things didn’t go well at all.

First lets get to email and web browsing. Their idea was simple enough… sorta. Go to Cingy’s Blackberry email site and set up a new account. It gives you a new address that you can forward mail to. You can even get it to reply from any email address you want, keeping your addresses unified. This process wasn’t hard at all. For me. But if Joey Twentysomething didn’t like to read manuals or startup pamphlets, he’d have no idea to go to that site. What’s more, if he decided he wanted to play with the browser first – guess what? There’s no browser in any menu anywhere. Oh, it’s in the manual all right, but dammed if that icon was anywhere to be found.

Being experienced with Blackberry, I know that the phone needs to be provisioned and paired with an enterprise or internet-based backend server before any of its user networking functions will work. Until the device is associated with a berry server, you’ve got a phone and simple unconnected PDA and that’s it. But at this point, Joey’s confused and pissed, and he wants to get this thing going so he can jump in his Camaro, pick up his girlfriend and show it off.

People like Joey need a phone-based wizard. When that phone boots up, they need to see RIM’s version of Clippy taking them step by step through the setup process. But not only was there no wizard, but pairing the device with the server didn’t actually work. After doing all the setup and sending service books to the device (“What’s a service book?” asks Joey) I still had no browser. Logging into the Cingular forums, it appears I wasn’t the only one either.

Moving on a second. The other problem I had after getting the device was that their amazing maps program – Telenav Maps – wasn’t working either. Not only wasn’t it working, it was actually crashing! Right out of the box, it would die with the error

error starting tnmaps_rim_client_ help: module 'net_rim_ec mascript' not found

and I wasn’t the only one with that problem either.

The only way I could fix either of these problems was to upgrade the firmware. That’s right. No rebooting, battery removing, resetting, service book sending, anything would get these things to work. I had to go to a page deep within the Cingy web, download a firmware upgrade, and start again.

I could only imagine my wife, let alone Joey Twentysomething, trying to get this thing to do anything besides make a call. It’s a shame too, because after all the setup pains, the device is phenomenal. I even installed a free IM client that works like a champ. Battery life is great, and all the functionality is rock solid. Guess the rewards only come for those in the know – or who are married to someone who’s in the know.