BlackBerry Curve 3G 9300

Intro

I’ve recently been TUPE’d over to a new company, but still do the same job. Because of the move I had to hand back my trusty old Nokia which has served me well for the last six years as a works phone. To my surprise I was given a shiny new Blackberry Curve from my new company.

Blackberry Curve

I’ve heard everyone rave and rave about Blackberry so I was quite excited at getting one for my work. On first impressions it’s a pretty good phone. The screen is bright and clear with vibrant colour, it’s loaded with features, most of which I’ll probably never use, so I spent some time familiarising myself with all the new functions a gadgety bits.

I think I might be classified as having Homer thumbs. As in the Simpson’s episode where he tried to make a phone call only to be informed by the operator “ The fingers you have used to dial this number are too fat “ The reason I might fall into this category is because of the size of the keyboard feature on the front of the Curve. It’s really barely visible never mind being operational. I find this most annoying as I quite often hit the wrong key when I am able to see the characters. If sunshine of light shines on them the wrong way them I’m goosed, I just can’t see the tiny little buttons.

Compared to my old Nokia the screen is substantially bigger, it is also way brighter and sharper. The colours are bright and vivid and pictures look very ice on it indeed. In between the miniscule keypad and the pretty screen is probably the function centre of the whole unit. One 4mm by 4mm trackpad, which helps enormously in the navigation of the screen and selecting icons. Once again the Homer thumbs were tested to the max and in all fairness this little trackpad although quite sensitive does function very well. The icons you are trying to click on are clear and of a decent size in comparison to the screen which does make navigation a lot easier.

Like most mobile’s these days the Blackberry is menu driven, but in it’s case most of the menus are pictures making it quite simple. The unit is chock full of apps and stuff to help productivity and has several entertainment apps, which are very nice, namely the mp3 player and music player which plays crisp and sharp through the supplied earphones/handsfree kit. The camera is 3.2megapixels so it takes nice sharp pics and videos and with 2Gb of disk space your not short of memory to save all those nice pics too.

The call quality is crisp sharp and clear so making a call is quite an enjoyable experience, unless you are on Orange in which case you have to roam around to get a signal. It comes with some nice useful apps such as maps, twitter if you are into this, and a pretty quick and effective browser, which I use daily to download details of my work.

In the settings section you can adjust all kinds of thing such as the trackpad sensitivity, which is very helpful if you find it a bit awkward you can slow it now by making it slightly less responsive. Three games are supplied of decent quality, with quite good graphics, in fact very good graphics for the size of screen, which is about 3 inches by 2 inches approx.

I was geared up to be so impressed, and I guess I am slightly if compared to my old Nokia, and if I’ honest I’m really a bit disappointed. It’s not the all singing all dancing machine I thought it would be, this said it is a very good and efficient phone which works great and does all it sets out to do, I was just looking for something with an edge and found something blunt instead. The talktime and battery times are very good considering how much and what I use it for. It's a robust solid feeling unit which exudes quality from everywhere.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, perhaps I’m just hard to please, but if I had paid a couple of hundred quid for this I’d be suicidal. If I was paying £35-£40 quid a month for it I’d probably already have topped myself, as it is it’s free and as such it does the job I require it to and so much more, but there just isn’t the spark I had hoped for.

Summary

Everything in this cool looking efficient and very good phone works perfectly and to a tee. Everything is probably just as good as it can be. Everything seems to be as it should, so why am I disappointed…………………….I wanted more, I wanted the spark, and want as I may it just wasn’t there for me. I have clicked the recommend button purely on the basis that it’s me a fault, I can’t find a fault with this it’s a great little phone without a doubt, It has never let me down it does all I need it to do, except light the light that I had anticipated.