The ad for the new BlackBerry Pearl asks "Are you confident enough to wear pink?" Funny, that''s how I''ve always felt about my pink-hued gadgets - I don''t need to have industrial looking (read: black) technology to be taken seriously. I want functionality and style, thank you very much.

I decorated my first BlackBerry with jewel-like rhinestones, and you can be sure no one in the AOL meetings accidentally picked mine up. Much later I graduated to the Curve, a wonderful machine, that I kept holstered in a classic pink leather holder.

But it wasn''t until the introduction of the Pearl, its smaller size and "lifestyle" features like television, music players, cameras and Facebook social-networking software that the BlackBerry appealed to a broader audience. Up to this point, my daughter Mackenzie had turned up her nose at my BlackBerry, which didn''t pass the most important test for a teenager, which seems to be the ability to put a gadget in the pocket of their jeans. When she saw my spiffy review unit of the Pearl, she had to have it.

Now they''ve improved on the basic model with the 8130, which is a lovely metallic blush, and features an improved camera (2.0 megapixels), video capabilities, full email and web browsing, a music player (player reads MP3, WMA, and AAC files and displays album art), Bluetooth, AND an expandable memory (up to 8GB.) Like it''s predecessor, it features SureType QWERTY keyboard technology - which you either love or hate. (My daughter is a wiz at typing on it, so there you go.).