Blackberry Curve 8900
The new Blackberry Curve is a lovely piece of kit, performing well and showing us all that RIM can be user friendly with a brand new and updated look to the theme. The 8900 stays true to the usual Curve line up which means it sadly lacks 3G. however the EDGE support is good enough to handle data.
Also on board you’ll find WiFi, 3.15 megapixel camera, mp3, DivX support right out of the box, built in GPS and many more.
So how does the 8900 hold out? Let’s see!
Construction and Build:
The 8900 is a lovely looking handset, lightweight and compact. Straight away when you pick it up you can feel that the build quality is top notch. The buttons at first look daunting but you’ll soon notice that they are slightly raised and ridged allowing for easier navigation.
The trademark Blackberry rollerball is still on board. This really comes in handy when browsing the web allowing for you to scroll using a mouse pointer on screen which is controlled via the rollerball.
Also onboard you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack, perfect for all that mp3 you’ll want to load onto the device. Also there is a dedicated camera shutter key which comes in very handy when capturing photos!
The screen is very good quality. The picture clarity is exceptionally good and watching video on the device is actually quite enjoyable because of this.
Other Features
One thing that I think is definitely worth mentioning is the Push email service. If you’ve owned a Blackberry before then you will already be familiar with this but if not then read on!
The push email supports up to 10 accounts, pushing email onto your device as soon as they are received by the server. This is absolutely superb and I have still not found any device that supports email as well as Blackberry do.
The only major downside with this is that on the 8900 you must have a blackberry subscription on your account in order to use any email at all. This is a nuisance and can often get pricing depending on what your network charge for the privilege.
Camera:
The camera performs well for a smartphone. It’s nothing special and does what you’d expect. You can capture some decent enough snaps and the LED flash and autofocus camera really help out but at the end of the day you’re not buying a Blackberry for the camera.
Conclusion:
All in all I really like this device. I think it’s a lovely looking piece of kit with a great amount of features built in. Everything that it does it does well with maybe the exception of the camera.
If emails are on the top of your list then the 8900 is worth checking out. It might take a little bit of getting used to but in the end it is worth it!
Advantages:
- 2.4" 65K-color TFT landscape display with a resolution of 480 x 360 pixels
- Comfortable four-row full QWERTY keyboard
- Quad-band GSM support
- WiFi
- BlackBerry OS v4.6
- Rollerball navigation
- Push Email
- Built-in GPS and BlackBerry maps preloaded
- 3.15 MP autofocus camera, LED flash
- 512 MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM
- Hot-swappable microSD card slot
- Good build quality
- DivX and XviD video support
- Compact body
- Good web browser
- 3.5 mm audio jack
- Nice audio quality
- Smart dialing
Disadvantages
- No 3G
- No email support without BlackBerry Internet Service account
- Mediocre camera
- No FM radio