Check out our BlackBerry Curve 8900 review for an in-depth look at T-Mobile's update to the most popular BlackBerry.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 (T-Mobile):
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_it00.jpg) The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 is the easiest BlackBerry device to recommend, and its perhaps one of the best smartphones on the market. The device has all the best BlackBerry features, including the spiffy new OS and pixel-packed screen, loads of e-mail support and great calling features, and some niceties thrown in by T-Mobile, including UMA for cheap Wi-Fi calls and extra IM clients onboard. The device has GPS and Wi-Fi, and it easily beats the older BlackBerry Curve, which was a hugely popular smartphone. We wish that RIM would cut down on the long lists and settings menus in favor of an all-around graphical interface, but once you get used to the lists its easy to see just how powerful and extensible a BlackBerry can be. The Curve 8900 comes out a little pricey at $200 on T-Mobile, but its still a solid BlackBerry, and sure to be just as popular as the first BlackBerry Curve. Release: February 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Slimmest full-QWERTY BlackBerry. Great messaging support. Slick design with a great, high-density screen.
Cons: No 3G networking. Lacks abundant storage. Call quality and reception could be better (though UMA helps).
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Full RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 (T-Mobile) Review:
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Design - Very Good
The RIM BlackBerry Curve has always been something of a compromise phone, but the BlackBerry family thrives on good compromises. The phone isn't as large, or presumably as powerful, as the larger BlackBerry devices, today those are the BlackBerry Bold and the BlackBerry Storm. It isn't as thin or narrow as the BlackBerry Pearl, but it retains the full QWERTY keyboard that the Pearl lacks. It's stuck in the middle, in terms of size, features and price, but the middle is the perfect place for this BlackBerry device.
In fact, if the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 is a step down from the BlackBerry Bold 9000, it's hard to tell. We prefer the styling on the Curve 8900. It lacks the cheesy faux-leather texture of the BlackBerry Bold, though the shell is still a hodge-podge of textures and materials, ranging from chrome to glossy plastic to a brushed metal look to soft-touch paint. It's as though different teams designed the device from different angles, but on the Curve 8900 it actually works.
The BlackBerry Curve 8900 also gets the most recent interface overhaul, and the phone's menus feel almost exactly like the BlackBerry Bold. The screen isn't quite as bright, but it packs the same number of pixels, 480 by 360, into an even smaller box. The interface is still plenty list-heavy, with long textual menus for settings and application functions. This BlackBerry still has a pager at its roots, and we hope that changes in the next generation. Still, this is about as nice as a pager will ever look, with a sharp interface theme complimented by that high-quality screen.
Calling - Very Good
The RIM BlackBerry Curve had call quality that was good. We had some spotty reception issues, and T-Mobile's network has never been strong in our part of New Jersey. But this was never a problem thanks to the phone's UMA capabilities. We've sung the praises of UMA before, but basically it allows the BlackBerry Curve to use either T-Mobile's cellular network or a Wi-Fi network for making calls. The phone can hop between the two with hardly an audible click, and calls that you start under a Wi-Fi umbrella are free, no matter where you end up. Call quality for this phone wasn't as good as the sound quality we heard on the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, but we think that UMA is a very strong feature, and it makes up for some of this phone's calling shortcomings.
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. We were even impressed by the speakerphone, which was just a little louder and a bit more clear than your average speaker.
Messaging - Very Good
For messaging, we have high expectations for a BlackBerry device, and the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 comes with all of the standards plus enough extras to keep us satisfied. Like all BlackBerry phones, the Curve 8900 can handle up to 10 e-mail addresses, and it keeps a unified Inbox for e-mail as well as separate account folders. We wish that the e-mail apps didn't rely so heavily on the menus, as we were constantly drilling to send, search, copy and forward our e-mails, but the e-mail system is undeniably robust.
T-Mobile has a great habit of offering a variety of IM support on their devices. The BlackBerry Curve 8900 includes IM support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, as well as ICQ and even Gtalk, our preferred IM service. The interface is a bit dull, more of those textual lists that remind of the old pager days, except that the phone can display IM icons.
The keyboard on the BlackBerry Curve took some getting used, but in the end we enjoyed the full-QWERTY keyboard and found ourselves typing without looking. Try that on a touchscreen phone. At times, some of the keys felt a bit flat and were harder for typing, especially the row of keys around the trackball. In all, however, the BlackBerry Curve 8900 will provide a typing experience that will appease even the most die-hard BlackBerry fans.
Multimedia - Very Good
We had a great multimedia experience with the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900, thanks mostly to the new BlackBerry Media Sync for Mac preview that we tried with the device. The BlackBerry Media Sync app searches your iTunes library and lets you synchronize music playlists with your BlackBerry. The app automatically excludes the DRM tracks that won't play on anything but an iPod. The interface was fairly simply, though it looked polished, and it worked as advertised. The transfer process was much slower than it would be on a native Apple device, but it was nice to have access to iTunes playlists on a BlackBerry phone. By usurping Apple's own system, RIM has leapfrogged other manufacturers, like Samsung and Nokia, who are still looking for a good media transfer option.
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 makes for a nice media playback device. The Curve features a 3.5mm headphone jack so you can use your favorite headphones. You can upgrade the microSD card from the paltry 256MB that T-Mobile includes by taking off the back cover, which is a bit inconvenient, but you don't have to remove the battery at least. We'd like to see more memory. Even a couple gigabytes built in would be a great improvement.
For movies, the BlackBerry Curve 8900 had no trouble with all of our test clips. It played back an MP4 video trailer from the Hulk and looked great, scaling the video with no trouble. In fact, we wished for better-looking content to really test the boundaries of the screen, as the high-density display was too good for our pixilated clips. For video management, you don't get help from the Media Sync software, but dragging onto the phone in Mass Storage mode worked just as well.
Scheduling and Productivity - Very Good
The calendar app, perhaps more than any other on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900, could benefit from a visual update, which would make it more usable at a glance. As is, the calendar is robust and powerful, 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. It's a wireframe box, a list of times in a vertical column. It's pretty ugly.
For Office document handling, the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 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 for our purposes, the suite did fine opening attachments and letting us make minor edits to Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Camera - Good
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 produces images that look okay, and perhaps even good for a cameraphone, though nothing too impressive. Shots look nice and clean, especially at a reduced zoom, but at full crop a loss of detail is apparent. Colors are fine, perhaps a little drab, but generally accurate. The camera also does a nice job with mixed lighting, as most of our appealing samples were taken at sunset.
Skating Pond at Sunset
Icy Path to Bridge
Two sunset shots look nice, and the camera doesn't blow out too much with the bright reflection of sunlight on the frozen pond. Still, at full crop, individual branches become jagged, and leaves become a messy green blob.
Feeding Geese Is Prohibited
On this one, too, the picture looks good from a distance, but at full zoom some compression artifacts are visible in the sign. The tree holds it together until the very tip top, where the light overcomes the thinner branches.
Macro Bark
Nice macro performance, undoubtedly helped by the auto focus. The bark is crisp with some nice detail. There's obvious over-sharpening going on in the post-processing, but the white balance is right on and the image looks great overall.
eBay R2-D2 Shot
The camera correctly balanced this shot a bit warm, as this artifact is from the late 1970s and is yellowing a bit. We've lost some detail, and the protocol droid is blowing out the highlight a bit, but this definitely gets across the general condition of the talking clock for an eBay sale.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 isn't perfect, but its much improved from the disappointing browser we found on the BlackBerry Bold 3 months ago. Our own home page rendered nicely. The masthead graphic was a bit off, and some thumbnails were placed far to the side of where they should have been, but the rest of the page was perfect. Pages loaded slowly over the EDGE network, but very quickly while we were in Wi-Fi range. For the record, we asked T-Mobile why the BlackBerry Curve was not a 3G device. Our T-Mobile rep expressed concern about the UMA features interfering with the HSDPA networking. So, it seems that the Curve trades unlimited free Wi-Fi calling for on-the-go faster Internet access. Perhaps its an even trade, and we're glad that RIM is excessively cautious about its radios. But we'd still like to see a fast BlackBerry on T-Mobile's new 3G network.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 will be available from T-Mobile on February 11th for $200 with a contract agreement.
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