This is what Blackberry says about its new BlackBerry® Curve™ 8320 smartphone,”it’s your connection to everything that matters”. Featuring a metallic finish, clean lines and soft edges, the BlackBerry® Curve™ 8320 smartphone is the smallest and lightest BlackBerry® smartphone ever to come with a full QWERTY keyboard.
It still offers a best-of-breed design that beautifully combines a full QWERTY keyboard into a sleek and compact form factor (4.2 inches high by 2.4 inches wide by 0.6 inch deep; 3.9 ounces). With such a slim profile and small weight, the Curve is comfortable to hold and use as a phone, even though it has a wider body than regular cell phones. The outer edges also have a soft-touch finish to give it a rubbery texture, thus making it easier to grip. Unlike the AT&T version, T-Mobile offers two color options: pale gold or titanium.
On front of the device, there’s a 2.5-inch diagonal, 65,000-color screen with a 320×240 pixel resolution. The display features a light-sensing technology that automatically adjusts the backlighting of the screen as well as the keyboard, based on your environment (indoors, outdoors, a dark room, and so forth). In addition, you can customize the screen with various themes and wallpaper, as well as adjust the font size, family, and style.
The camera lens, flash, and self-portrait mirror are on the back of the device, and a mute button is located on top. The Curve is equipped with a microSD slot, but it’s located behind the battery, so it’s a bit inconvenient to access. T-Mobile ships the RIM BlackBerry 8320 with a travel charger, a USB cable, a wired stereo headset, a belt holster, and reference material. For more BlackBerry add-ons and downloads, check out our cell phone accessories page.
The RIM BlackBerry 8320’s biggest draw is the addition of Wi-Fi. It supports 802.11b/g, whether you’re using your home or corporate network or hopping onto a Wi-Fi hot spot. The Curve also works with T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home, which lets you make and receive calls using both regular GSM cellular networks and preconfigured wireless networks. The benefit of this is that calls made via Wi-Fi will not be deducted from your cellular plan, meaning you get unlimited calls as long as you’re within range of the hot spot.
Other wireless options include EDGE and Bluetooth. Supported Bluetooth profiles include those for wireless headsets, hands-free kits, dial-up networking, object exchange, and A2DP for stereo Bluetooth headsets. Unlike the BlackBerry 8820, however, the Curve doesn’t include a GPS radio. Instead, you will have to take advantage of the device’s integrated Bluetooth and add this functionality via a Bluetooth GPS receiver.
The BlackBerry 8320 is compatible with your company’s BlackBerry Enterprise server with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise to deliver corporate e-mail in real time. In total, the device can support as many as 10 accounts, including POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts, and there is an e-mail wizard on the device to guide you through the setup process. An attachment viewer is also onboard to open popular file formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG, GIF, and more, and we were able to receive and open all files. Other messaging options include text, multimedia, and instant messaging. Of the latter, we were thrilled that T-Mobile included access to some of the most popular IM clients today, such as AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live Messenger.
Like the original Curve, the BlackBerry 8320 has a spell-check feature for e-mails. As you would expect, the feature will look for any spelling errors in your messages before they’re sent and offer alternatives to misspelled words. Spell-check is also available for memos, but not for text messages. You can turn this feature on under the Options > Spell Check menu, where you can also find settings to ignore acronyms, words with numbers, add words to a custom dictionary, and more.
There are a number of PIM tools, such as a calendar, a tasks list, a memo pad, an alarm, a calculator, and the BlackBerry maps application. The latter is particularly useful, as it gives you maps of the United States as well as text-based driving directions–great for mobile professionals
There is a media player onboard that supports MP3, AAC, MIDI, and WAV music files and AVI, MP4, MOV, and 3GP video formats. There’s 64MB of flash memory, but you should store multimedia files on a microSD card since they tend to be memory hogs. The music player is pretty rudimentary, but it displays some track information such as title, artist, and album art, and you can create playlists as well as shuffle and repeat songs. You can have music play in the background while you use the device’s other apps, and if there’s an incoming call, the Curve will pause the music, then resume the track after you hang up. One notable improvement to the video player is the support for full-screen mode, so you can take advantage of the entire screen’s real estate. The 3.5-millimeter headset jack is also a boost, since it gives you the ability to plug in a better set of headphones or earbuds.
The BlackBerry 8320 boasts a 2-megapixel camera with a 5x zoom and a built-in flash, but unfortunately, still no video-recording capabilities. You do get three picture sizes (1,600×1,200; 1,024×768; and 640×480) and three quality options (superfine, fine, and normal). You can also tweak the white balance and add color effects. Picture quality was good when we could get a clear shot. We found it a bit difficult to get steady shot and had to really concentrate on holding the phone still in order to get a decent photo. Once we did, however, pictures had decent color tone and definition.