Blackberry Curve 8900

Full Review

The BlackBerry Curve 8900 is the latest RIM smartphone to hit the market, and it's the smallest and lightest BlackBerry to feature a full QWERTY keyboard.

Design & Usability

The BlackBerry Curve 8900 is a delight to look at. It’s a comfortable size, and much more compact than both the BlackBerry Bold and the BlackBerry Storm. Importantly, though, the smaller real estate hasn’t affected the overall user experience. The full QWERTY keypad and the standard BlackBerry trackball both remain at the heart of this smartphone. The outstanding display is put to good use, with the same operating system as the BlackBerry Bold. New features in the latest 4.6 version include improvements to the BlackBerry browser, editing support for Excel and Word documents and a bedside mode that conveniently switches off light, sound and vibration alerts, dims the screen and turns the Curve into an alarm clock while you sleep.

The outstanding display is put to good use, with the same operating system as the BlackBerry Bold.

Online Experience

For mobile Internet, the included BlackBerry browser can't compete with Safari on the iPhone 3G, but it remains a viable solution for browsing the Web. Pages are rendered well, though panning around a page is more arduous than should be — we recommend pumping up the trackball sensitivity when using the browser, but it's still too easy to accidentally click a link. The BlackBerry Curve 8900 features Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and built-in GPS. The lack of 3G is arguably the biggest disappointment: although e-mail doesn’t skip a beat and downloadable social-networking applications such as Facebook and TwitterBerry work fine over GPRS. RIM's latest BlackBerry phones have plenty of appeal for regular consumers as well as businesspeople.

Multimedia

The Curve 8900 features a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card slot for extra memory. It handles most media well — especially videos on the superb display — and the external speaker is loud and clear. It can synchronize with Apple's iTunes using the BlackBerry Media sync software.

Bottom Line

The Curve 8900 is priced at Rs. 18,500 and is a great smartphone to handle all your communication needs. Boasting a super sharp display, it couples excellent design with exceptional performance.