The BlackBerry Pearl 91xx series has had disappointing sales so far, with most BlackBerry buyers opting instead for a full qwerty experience. Still those who are buying the Pearl are actually opting for the even fewer keyed 9105 over the SureType 9100. The following chart shows the percent of Pearl 3G owners using each model over half month intervals, from the second half of August to the first half of October.

Surprisingly the 9105 has consistently held around two-thirds of the Pearl 3G market. There are a few things that this may imply. First that anyone looking for a more complicated keyboard is willing to take the step to a full qwerty device. Second of all it looks as if the target market is people who already are well accustomed to 9 key typing, and want to keep an experience that they already know from their non-smart phones when they upgrade to a BlackBerry. Another possible conclusion is that SureType is dead. BlackBerry has been the only model to offer something between 9key and full qwerty keyboards, and it isn’t selling it all that well. Of course all of this data is from before the recent launch of the Pearl 3G on AT&T in the United States, so next month it is possible that these statistics change completely.

As usual, all of these statistics come from downloads of the free game Pixelated, the most popular strategy game in BlackBerry AppWorld.