Blackberry 8300 Curve - Combining Business With Fun Wherever You Go

 
RIM has dominated the business sector of the mobile phone market since the introduction of the first Blackberry, but the latest versions of the Blackberry sport a more fashionable design and the latest mobile features, making handsets like the Blackberry 8300 Curve appealing to more users than just businessmen. The 8300 Curve still features all the standard Blackberry personal assistant features and is a dream for messaging, but the Curve is small, stylish, and includes fun multimedia features like a music player and a 2 megapixel camera.

The design of the 8300 Curve is fabulous, especially compared to older, bulky versions of the Blackberry. The display screen is large, 64 mm, full colour, and high resolution. While the screen is light sensitive, automatically adjusting to various lighting conditions, it can be still be hard to see in direct sunlight. The classy, smooth silver casing may look great, but the shiny chrome finish creates glares as well.

Along the bottom of the vivid display screen, just above the curvaceous keyboard, there are four dedicated soft keys and a unique trackball for effortless navigation. The trackball features just the right amount of sensitivity and is much easier to use than traditional navigation pads. The thumb board makes up the lower portion of the 8300 Curve and is quite functional. The thin design of the handset makes it comfortable to use the keys and, once you become accustomed to the lack of dedicated keys for email symbols, you can text and email at lightening fast speeds compared to a standard mobile number pad.

 
 
The Blackberry may be designed for the business user, but the 8300 Curve had entertainment in mind as well. The best camera phone RIM has to offer to date, the 2 megapixel camera on the 8300 Curve features an LED flash and is capable of capturing both still images and video. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do either too well and picture quality is rather blurry. The media player is much more appealing, with support for most common file formats. The 8300 Curve has a clear loudspeaker as well as a standard headphone jack for excellent playback and videos are terrific on the large display screen.

The 8300 Curve has redefined the look and feel of the Blackberry, but this handset is rather disappointing when it comes to the latest in technology. All of the PDA features you would expect from a Blackberry are included and all types of messaging are supported, including Blackberry instant messenger and push email. Blackberry maps is also on the feature list, offering turn by turn directions and simple route mapping.

Despite the great looking design, there are quite a few disadvantages to the Blackberry 8300 Curve. The maps application is highly functional, but many users would have found GPS capabilities more useful and the document viewer does not allow files to be edited or created, although email attachments are supported. The biggest flaw with the 8300 Curve is the lack of 3G technology. Internet surfing is much slower than comparable smart phones and downloads, including attachments, require some patience.

Overall, the Blackberry 8300 Curve is a welcome change to the traditional RIM family. The design is attractive, the call quality is a big improvement over previous models, and the feature line up is both fun and functional. The camera isn’t the best and internet activities are slow with the lack of 3G, but the 8300 Curve has created an entirely new type of Blackberry user.

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