I’ve been a Palm user since the Handspring Visor I got back in 1999. I’ve been through a Zire 31, a Tungsten C and most recently a Palm TX. I like my TX, but I don’t want to carry both it and a phone around. I looked at the various Treo models, but wasn’t really impressed. I made the leap to a Blackberry Curve 8320 about ten days ago, after taking a hard look at the iPhone. I wanted a PDA phone that offered a better phone experience and had third party application support. The Curve 8320 was released by T-Mobile on 9/24/2007, just in time for my birthday on the 27th and my T-mo upgrade eligibility. The upgrade price was $299 with one of those loathsome rebate forms to file to get $50 back. It was a relief to loose the Motorola Razr V3, which had more problems than a math book and notoriously crappy software. More below the fold…
The Curve has some sweet hardware features. It’s the first Blackberry phone to integrate wi-fi (an absolute requirement for me) , removable microSD memory (up to 4GB), a decent 2.0 mega pixel camera and a so-so media player in one device. It sports a mini trackball for navigation. I find it much easier to use than the trackwheel thingamajig on the company issued BB 8700C. It makes the 8700C seems like the Curve’s fat ugly cousin. It also sports Bluetooth stereo audio (A2DP/AVCRP), 3.5mm headphone jack and speaker phone. The display is 2.5 inches (320 x 240 pixels, 65,000+ colors). It’s a GSM quad band world phone.
I ordered a 2GB microSD card from good old newegg.com to make good use of the media player features. The Curve helpfully offered to store pictures from the 2.0 mega pixel camera on the card, once it was in place. One major pet peeve of mine is putting the memory slot under the battery. Do they hate their customers? Why wasn’t it made externally inserted like the Pearl 8130? No changing that sucker on the fly. If I had noticed that before I ordered my memory card I would have ordered a 4GB card and maxed out storage. Bah.
It doesn’t come with a MS compatible document reader/editor like Dataviz’s Documents To Go, like the TX. It does offer a somewhat lame attachment viewing but you can’t save, edit or synchronize documents. Dataviz does plan a Blackberry release, someday. There are other 3rd party MS compatible viewer/editors out there, but I haven’t had a chance to really look at them yet.
I liked the Palm migration tool, with a gripe or two. It moved the address book, notepad, calendar and task entries cleanly over to the Curve. No help for migrating bookmarks or media files. The desktop synchronization tool needs some help. It lacks the ability to sync via wi-fi. It seems less polished than the venerable Palm Desktop. It does offer the ability to sync certificates which is helpful in the enterprise environment.
The integrated web browser is an improvement over Palm Blazer, but that wasn’t really a high standard to beat. It’s no where near as polished as the iPhone Safari Browser. It seems a bit more sluggish than the TX opening pages via wi-fi. The T-Mo Edge network is not a speed demon, but it does get the job done eventually when there no hotspot to be had.
One genuinely cool feature is the T-Mo Hotspot@Home UMA calling over wi-fi. It also allows an alternative to Edge, but is oddly not much faster for data. Since the cell signal strength at my house is weak and something about the office causes now you see it, now you don’t coverage. UMA was a prerequisite for my phone upgrade. It’s another feature missing from the iPhone/AT&T combo. The Curve latched onto the Dlink router at home and the Cisco enterprise wi-fi at the office with out trouble. The wi-fi setup application works well and is happy with WEP, WPA and certificates. It doesn’t mind the web login required by the office guest wi-fi. I haven’t quite figured out how to make our certificate based internal network connection work yet, but I only spent a few minutes playing with. Once on wi-fi, calls from both locations are much clearer than they were over GSM with few drops and awkward “are you still there?” moments.
Input is better than the Palm OS Graffiti system or soft keyboard. The Blackberry QWERTY keyboard is OK, but I thought the Tungsten C was a bit more tactile and crisper. There was some learning curve to get used to Blackberry shortcuts and input, but after a bit more than a week I feel pretty comfortable with it.
The phone seems to have good reception and all the bells and whistles one would expect from a modern PDA phone. It has marginal a voice dial feature that mostly seems to misunderstand me. I think I liked the voice training process on my Razr better for its accuracy. It was a bit more trouble to setup but it did work more reliably. The speakerphone is usable and surprisingly loud. You can dial from the voice recognition (if you’re lucky), the address book or phone numbers turned up in a web search from the browser.
It came packaged with the Blackberry Maps application. That was the first bit to get uninstalled and replaced with Google Maps. This version of the Curve lacks the integrated GPS of the 8310, but the 8310 lacks wi-fi.
It has the standard business oriented BES push e-mail features like the 8700C I have to carry around when on-call. It also has BIS and had no problem at all connecting to the IMAP4 SSL, POP3 SSL or SMTP SSL running on my SME 7.2 Linux box at home. Yahoo mail integrates nicely and Gmail is trivial to setup with Google Mobile applications. Hotmail requires the subscription service, but can be used over the MSN Mobile service for free.
The Blackberry Desktop Manager includes a version of Roxio Media Manager. It seem extremely slow to navigate through files on the device or memory card. While you can change mp3 tag information on the files stored on the PC through Media manager, I can’t find a way to change mp3 tags after they’ve been imported to the Curve. Overall, I think I’d prefer to sync music with Real Player or Windows Media Player, since both can see the Curve as a removable drive. Even Windows Explorer would be better. I do note that file transfer times are better then on the Palm. It’s a welcome improvement.
To summarize, the Curve is a full featured PDA/smartphone that offers Blackberry’s enterprise class push e-mail features, wi-fi, UMA calling, up to 4GB of microSD memory, a decent media player, PDA features and a quality mobile phone in a sleek package. It straddles the border between the business oriented 8700 and 8800 and the Pearl model while catching the best of both and a bit more. It’s not without blemishes. The screen could be larger and it should come with better software out of the box. And why does anyone put the microSD slot under the battery anymore? The 312MHz Intel XScale processor is a bit on the anemic side, they could have bumped it up a notch for performance sake, but that would have required a larger battery and case. A bigger display would have been nice too. That’s the only thing I miss about the TX. All-in-all it’s a great PDA phone.
