The Pearl is RIM's big jump into consumer-level Blackberries. As such, it pairs just fine with ANY system running XP, on a handful of BT stacks. With a minor modem script tweak, it also tethers to any Mac OS X system.

Normally, I'd agree that it's the Blackberry. My old 7250, my 7130, and a coworker's 8703 have a snowball's chance in hell of pairing to a 770 for DUN.

The Pearl/8100 *has no such restriction.* A T-Mo/Cingular dealer *will* balk at selling it for pairing to a Mac, but that's because it's not officially supported, solely due to RIM's lack of development focus on the Mac side. How is a Mac any different from a 770, from that perspective?