lately my phone has been lagging a lot. The hour glass pops up pretty frequently. When typing, playing brick breaker, etc. it is pretty annoying. What is the cause of this? and how do i fix it?

Its prob being caused by lack of memory. First do a hard reset (battery pull for 15 secs). You can also get the softreset app by metsfan, that way you dont have to take the cover off and stuff. Secondly idk if you have a microSD card, but get one of those and put all the media on there. Free up as much room for the OS as possible. Hope this helps.

my phone isn't out of memory, i have over 28 mb available and i also put all my pictures on a media card. but my phone is still slow. the only 3rd party apps i have are:
gmail
google maps
telenav

i deleted all the languages (but english) and bb maps. and the preloaded video.

it seems that my phone went slow all of a sudden. any ideas?

This just happened to me few minutes ago. I pulled out the battery and it works now. I hate it when the Pearl freezes.