Video: BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220

I've come to think of CNet Senior Editor Bonnie Cha as my own personal mobile phone guru, and today she does a bang-up job of showing off RIM's other brand-new, revolutionary-form-factor, wannabe-game-changer phone: the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220.

This slick black phone is the first clamshell phone from RIM, and along with the BlackBerry Storm represents RIM's big push to snatch up some non-enterprise customers who may be thinking about touch-screens or more traditional, function-friendly designs... such as the time-honored flip phone.

With a pricetag of $149.99, RIM and T-Mobile are going to be upgrading the next generation of what I like to call "Mom phones," and that's more important than I might be making it sound: with the latest BlackBerry OS and style from here to there, the Pearl Flip represents a kind of collective upgrading of traditional non-smartphones.

As epochal as the iPhone revolution has been, most folks out there still just want a basic, functional phone that works well and feels familiar. While we techie types may swoon and croon over such futuristic features as push email and streaming video, the masses just want a phone they can reliably use without learning how to dial the phone all over again. Kudos to RIM for sneaking in a bit of the future into the present, relatively speaking.