BlackBerry Curve 3G 9300

I have had this phone since September 2011 as I needed to get a new phone when I moved back to the UK and wanted a cheap contract so that I don't have to pay loads on phones because I am still tied into my Austrian mobile contract until January 2013, which is quite annoying! I was offered a contract with Virgin for only £10 and month and a free Blackberry so I thought "why not?" My mum had a similar Blackberry and told me it was good, though my sister kept asking me why I hadn't got an iphone. I have to admit that after using this phone for a while I thought my sister was right and I should have just paid the bit extra and got an iphone!

This phone can be summed up by saying it does the job, but there is really nothing exciting about it at all. It is basically a business phone.

You can see the appearance of it from the photo above. It looks okay, fairly slimline and is not too heavy and bulky. It weighs 106 g and is 14 mm thick.

Features

It has a full QWERTY keyboard which I suppose is quite a plus as it does allow me to type quickly and is easier to handle than touch screen keyboards. The buttons are quite small so sometimes it can get frustrating if I am trying to type really fast and my fingers slip onto the next button. It does correct your typing though as long as it can still recognise what you are trying to say. This is good for emails and texts.

It does not have touch screen and when I first got this phone I kept having to stop myself swiping the screen as I was used to my old Samsung Galaxy! Most navigation is done by way of the track pad in the middle and pressing either the centre button or the button with a Blackberry logo on it. It is immediately the most intuitive but once you play around with it for a while everything does become clear.

The main icons are easy to access as they are along the bottom of my home screen. I have two email folders there, my texts, phone book, calender and internet browser. I find it very handy to have these icons right there as I can always immediately see if I have got new messages and quickly get to the internet or my contacts. The best thing about this phone in my opinion is the way you can have email accounts linked to it. On my old phone I would just go to the internet and log in to Gmail via my browser, so this is a bit better for emails. You can set it up so you are alerted for every email or turn the alert tone off, and I have this on or off depending on whether I am waiting for an urgent email or whether I am getting sick of the constant pinging!

The phone book is easy to navigate and much like most phones these days you can add a lot of information for each contact, such as full addresses, emails, various phone numbers, birthday reminders. Making phone calls is very easy and it generally has clear sound. I have not really experienced any problems with phone calls.

The camera is okay but nothing mind blowing. I hardly ever use it because my proper camera takes much much better pictures. It is a 2 megapixel camera and the pictures sometimes come out a bit dark in my experience.

The internet on this phone is okay for basic things such as googling something or quickly checking some information, but as the screen is a bit small and it is not touch screen and some things don't seem to work properly, such as Google maps, I definitely don't think it is the best phone if you want to use the internet on it a lot. The fact Google maps doesn't work properly is a big minus for me, as I rely on Google maps if I am going somewhere new. I recently was flat hunting in London and had been given the street address of the estate agent but did not know exactly where this was. I actually had to buy a pocket A to Z so that I was able to find various things in my new area, which I found a bit of a pain as I should have been able to just check on my phone! I felt a bit old fashioned with my paper A to Z LOL :) It has its own GPS navigation which has been a bit glitchy for me in the past so I don't like to rely on it.

Facebook is okay on the Blackberry as there is an app which you can get to enable easy use of Facebook. However, often my messages and notifications don't show up on there and I have to go on a computer to be able to see them properly, so it is not fully reliable. It is okay for just having a quick look at the news feed though or checking in at a location, uploading a photo etc. I don't use other social networks like Twitter so I can't comment on how good Blackberry is for this.

As far as other apps go, Blackberry is really pitiful. There is pretty much nothing worth having in the "Blackberry app world". Compared to the iphone or Android phones, I don't think Blackberry Curve can even really call itself a smart phone. On my Austrian phone which is an Android, I could get pretty much anything and my favourite apps were simple ones like World Newspapers app where you can quickly just browse the news from loads of different papers. You cannot even get a basic app like this on the Blackberry. It is a joke! The main thing people seem to like about Blackberry is the Blackberry messenger but I have never even used it. It seems to be more popular among teenagers as far as I can tell, and most of my friends have iphones rather than Blackberries so I would have no one to contact on it anyway other than my mum!

It has all the usual basic features which you would expect such as an alarm clock, voice recorder, blue tooth. It is definitely more of a business phone than a fun phone, as it does have programmes on it such as full word processing and spread sheets. The word processing has occasionally come in handy as I was able to open MS Word documents on the go when I was doing pro bono projects at my law school. However, most of the time if I wanted to use word processing I would just use my laptop.

The features all are more practical than fun, and they are fairly limited compared to most phones around today.

The battery life is fairly decent and I can often use it for a couple of days or even 3 before having to charge it, depending on whether I have been making a lot of phone calls.

Over all

If you just want a functional phone then this will be fine. If you want to send a lot of emails on the go or need to read Word documents for work then it is very practical. However, if you want a fun smartphone you might find this quite boring and prefer to get something else which actually has a good selection of Apps, such as the iphone or an Android phone.

Summary: It does the job but nothing more!