T-Mobile's newest bargain BlackBerry phone is surprisingly capable and offers some new features, like an optical trackpad. Is it really a great deal? Find out in our BlackBerry Curve 8520 review.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520:
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 Somebody forgot to tell the BlackBerry Curve 8520 that it's supposed to be a budget BlackBerry device. Sure, the phone lacks some of the high-end features of other BlackBerry phones, like a high-res screen or GPS navigation, but the Curve 8520 does right all of the things that we expect from a BlackBerry. For e-mail and messaging, it's just as fast and well organized as any other BlackBerry phone. We even like the design. Though it's supposed to be low-end, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 packs some new additions we've never seen on a BlackBerry, like a responsive optical trackpad button and real multimedia playback controls. The keyboard is solid and we rarely noticed a dip in performance compared to more advanced BlackBerry phones. Plus, on T-Mobile's network, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 is capable of cut-rate calling with it's UMA Hotspot @Home calls over your Wi-Fi network. In the end, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 is an easy phone to recommend, especially since Amazon is offering the phone at launch for only a penny, with a contract. Release: August 2009. Price: $1.
Pros: Slick, lightweight design with a nice optical trackpad and media playback controls. Does almost everything the more expensive BlackBerry phones can do.
Cons: Lacks GPS and high-speed networking. Call quality is mediocre. Battery life not as impressive as other BlackBerry phones.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The BlackBerry Curve 8520 is supposed to be the less expensive sibling to T-Mobile's popular Curve 8900, but in many ways the newer design is actually an improvement. The phone lacks the familiar chrome band that has become a trademark of recent BlackBerry devices, and the materials, mostly glossy black plastic with rubberized sidewalls, certainly identify this as a less-than-premium phone. But we actually like the nubby buttons that emerge from beneath the unbroken rubber, and we've been waiting for RIM to add media controls to a BlackBerry device, which the BlackBerry Curve 8520 has.
The Curve 8520 is the first BlackBerry we've seen to use an optical trackpad button instead of a trackball. Usually, these optical pads are reserved for higher-end phones, like the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. We've never been big fans of this input method, especially not on Windows Mobile devices, but on the BlackBerry platform, the optical touchpad seems to work nicely. It was at least as effective as trackball, and though it wasn't perfectly sensitive, it was responsive enough. The only time we felt frustrated by the trackpad was scrolling through long documents or Web pages. We wish the device would coast better as we scrolled, or perhaps an accompanying 4-way button would do the trick.
The screen on the BlackBerry Curve 8520 is nice and clear, with a QVGA resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. That's about half the pixels you'll find on better BlackBerry phones, like the BlackBerry Bold. Still, the main BlackBerry menu pages looked nice and crisp, and the BlackBerry OS relies so much on blacks and deep contrast that the screen was good enough for most applications. Watching movies or trying to read text on a zoomed-out Web page, you'll notice the lack of extra pixels, but it won't bother most users.
Calling – Very Good
The BlackBerry Curve 8520 did a nice job with phone calls, and it has a few cool tricks up its sleeve that can save you money under the right circumstances. Call quality was okay, but disappointing compared to better BlackBerry devices. Voices sounded a bit muffled on our end, and our callers reported a slightly digitized effect on the other side. Voice quality overall was mediocre. Battery life also takes a significant hit on this phone. The BlackBerry Curve 8520 ships with a lower-capacity battery than the Curve 8900, so instead of 7 hours or more talk time out of this device, plan on talking for under 6 hours between charges. It's still pretty good for a cell phone battery, but not too impressive for a BlackBerry phone.
For reception, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 got a solid signal from T-Mobile's EDGE network, but most of the time we used the phone on our home or office Wi-Fi network. The Curve 8520 features UMA calling, which lets you jump between the regular cellular service and calls over a Wi-Fi network. If you sign up for T-Mobile's UMA service, the carrier gives you unlimited minutes on any call that starts from a Wi-Fi network. So, you can start your conversation at your local coffee shop, and even if you chat for a couple hours while you stroll around the city, the call won't count against your monthly minutes. Between this feature and T-Mobile's myFaves calling plan, which gives you unlimited calling to your 5 favorite people, there's a definite bargain to be found.
Otherwise, the phone has a great selection of all our favorite calling features. For instance, to search the address book, we only had to start typing from the phone's standby screen. We found the speaker-independent voice dialing worked perfectly in our tests, and we appreciate when this app is assigned to a soft key by default. Conference calling worked fine, and the phone connected to our Bluetooth devices with no trouble. The speakerphone was adequate, though not quite loud enough to hear easily in a loud car driving down the highway.
Messaging – Very Good
The best thing about the bargain-priced BlackBerry Curve 8520 is that it still has all the great messaging capabilities of the best BlackBerry phones. We like BlackBerry devices for messaging because the BlackBerry OS gathers all of your incoming messages into one convenient inbox. E-mail, Instant Message conversations, SMS text messages and now even incoming Facebook messages are all grouped together into one spot. You can still access all of these individually in their respective apps, but we like having easy access to everything at once, and we appreciate the convenience of having a single folder where we can be notified and read all our new messages at once, instead of jumping around from app to app.
Even though our company doesn't use a corporate BlackBerry Enterprise Server, we still had no trouble setting up our Gmail account with the BlackBerry Curve 8520's e-mail setup wizard. If you need corporate mail from an Exchange server, there's a desktop redirect tool available that will forward messages to your device. BlackBerry has been promising a Mac option for their desktop software for some time, and we thought it would arrive with the BlackBerry Curve 8520, but Mac users will have to wait until September for RIM to launch the new software.
We liked the keyboard on the BlackBerry Curve 8520. It feels a bit more stiff and slippery than the keyboard on some of the more expensive BlackBerry devices, but we like the way each key is nicely separated from the next. It's practically identical to the keys on the Curve 8900, in fact. We had no problem typing long e-mails or entering complicated Web addresses. Again, in terms of the hardware, the Curve 8520 hardly seems low-end at all.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
The calendar on the BlackBerry Curve 8520 is robust and powerful, the same as you'll find on any other BlackBerry device, with plenty of fields to keep track of appointments and meetings. Still, it looks about the same as it did when BlackBerry devices first hit the market years ago. It's a wireframe box, a list of times in a vertical column. It's pretty ugly. Even for Office document handling, RIM didn't skimp with the Curve 8520, and it comes packed with DataViz Documents to Go. This isn't a complete, premium edition, so you won't be able to create new documents unless you pay to upgrade. But it's still just as good as the suite you'll find on the more expensive BlackBerry phones, and for our purposes, the apps did a fine job opening attachments and letting us make minor edits to Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Multimedia – Very Good
For multimedia playback, the BlackBerry Curve is actually better than most other BlackBerry devices, thanks to the new hardware controls that line the top of the device. Instead of having to sift through long menus to control your music, you can just press the play button and jump right into your tunes. Music playback on the device was very good. With the BlackBerry Media Sync application on our laptop, we were able to synchronize all of our non-DRM music and playlists from iTunes, and our songs came through just fine with album artwork in tact. To help with listening, the Curve 8520 uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack so you can use your favorite earbuds, and T-Mobile even includes a 1GB microSD card, which is a good start for a couple long playlists.
Even for video, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 managed to impress, though it's lower resolution screen wasn't as jaw-dropping as the brilliant display on the BlackBerry Bold or BlackBerry Storm. Still, the Curve 8520 did a great job handling our video files. Even higher, VGA resolution videos scaled nicely to the device's screen, and playback was quite smooth, though a bit blocky looking.
Web browsing - Good
We certainly weren't expecting any improvements on the BlackBerry Curve 8520's Web browser, since the browser has always been a low point for RIM's devices. No surprises here, then, that the browser did an adequate job, but was ultimately disappointing. Pages looked imperfect, with layout problems and jagged graphics, even when we found the setting for high quality images. Text also looked a little thin and blocky. CNN will recognize this device as a desktop-grade browser, instead of offering just the mobile page, but we had a hard time digging through the settings to make this option work.
Camera - Mediocre
Images from the 2-megapixel camera on the BlackBerry Curve 8520 looked lousy. Without auto focus, the camera rarely sharpened on the subject in the foreground, and usually focused on the backdrop instead. Colors were poor and usually too warm, a bit reddish in tone. Details were completely gone at full zoom, and we saw quite a bit of digitized looking oversharpening going on in the processing stage. Plus, the camera lacks a flash or a self-portrait mirror. We weren't blown away by the higher-megapixel cameras on more expensive BlackBerry devices, but surely RIM can do better than this, even on the bargain BlackBerry. Check out our image samples below.
Self Portrait
Flowers and sky
Ugly tomatoes
What's Missing?
So, what are you really losing by chosing the BlackBerry Curve 8520 over a different BlackBerry device? Nothing really, in terms of the software and apps available on the phone. But you do lose some hardware features. The camera packs a lower resolution sensor, as we've mentioned. The phone also lacks a 3G radio for faster network, though none of T-Mobile's BlackBerry phones, including the BlackBerry Curve 8900, use their 3G HSDPA network. We've heard from T-Mobile reps in the past that the Curve's UMA capabilities might conflict with the HSDPA networking. Still, the BlackBerry Bold and every new BlackBerry on Sprint or Verizon uses 3G networks. The Curve 8520 also lacks GPS, so you won't get turn-by-turn directions from TeleNav. Finally, as we mentioned earlier, the battery on the BlackBerry Curve 8520 is smaller than the battery on other BlackBerry phones, and talking time takes a hit because of this.
On T-Mobile's official Web site, as of press time, the BlackBerry Curve 8520, at $130, costs $20 less than the BlackBerry Curve 8900, at $150. But Amazon is selling both phones for $0.01 with a contract agreement, and we know that deals can be found at other large retailers, like Walmart. Except for the optical trackpad and the music playback controls, the Curve 8520 offers no advantages over the Curve 8900, so all things (like price) being equal, we'd still stick with the Curve 8900.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520 is available now from T-Mobile for $130 with a contract. Amazon is currently offering the phone for as little as $0.01 with a 2-year agreement.
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