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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: BlackBerry Curve 8320 Smartphone Titanium (T-Mobile) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted BlackBerry Curve 8320 Smartphone Titanium (T-Mobile) Reviews (cont...)Date: 2008-03-05 Great features but questionable build quality Features and usability-wise, this phone is simply awesome. You will get hooked once you start using it. Other reviewers have covered most features in detail so I will not go there. However, I did face some pretty serious issues with the phone. Within a week, I noticed that a crack had started appearing on the upper right hand corner of the phone. Then in a couple of days time a similar crack started appearing on the left side too. The phone was never dropped and neither was it stuffed into any jeans pockets (its winter time so it was mostly in the coat pocket in its case). Then, when I tried to take the rear cover off to take out the SIM card before shipping the unit back, the cover just wudnt budge. After a half-an-hour long struggle at the T-Mobile store with 5 people trying all they could, we finally managed to pry it open to realize that the rubber lining between the cover and the main body had somehow melted and become sticky - thus preventing the cover from sliding off. This is in a phone a week old! I am still not aware of how T-Mobile will resolve the issue (their customer service is amazing btw, it is hard to believe that they and Verizon actually are from the same planet!). This may just be a one off issue with this specific piece and I waiting for the replacement. Something to look out for nonetheless. Date: 2008-03-05 Not for the new users of Blackberry Set the scene and then I can base the critism on my user profile. Note, this review is about the phone and not the service. I get 200-250 e-mails a day and in 4-8 meetings a day. I am 35 years old. I spend 10-12 hrs a working day around a computer. I just used a small laptop for my organiser and e-mail. I have never used a PDA. Blackberry seems an obvious choice to make me more productive? Why did I buy? -Many people around me had PDAs either iPhone or Blackberry. I felt I was being left behind. -Computing magazine review rated this phone the highest for e-mail -I wanted easier access to my Outlook calendar and e-mail -It's cool for my friends to see me with one?! What's good about it? It was easy to link to my Outlook exchange server and get e-mails. But the goodness stops there. It may be easy to put gas/petrol in the car but if the car is slow, incredibly difficult to steer and drive, what's the point of having easy filling? What's bad? -It crashes once a day. -The keys are so rediculously small that writing text fast will not happen. You hit multiple and wrong keys. You often need the delete key and it is burried at the bottom under your thumb. Someone needs to think about usability! -Usability is appauling!!! I expect to invest some time in learning new technology but the whole thing has been designed without a primary audience. I want a Blackberry to phone, see my calendar and read and answer short e-mails. I have an iPod for music. You start the device and you have by default 20+ icons. I want 3!!! The first thing you need to work out is how to get rid of the usless items to make it quick to navigate to your primary use cases. (Blackberry, give me a set up wizard!) When you want to dial a number you have to use the 9 '2' font keys on the screen. Doing this with one hand is painful. The numbers are also on the left hand side. Most of use will use our right thumb! Then to chnage any settings most items are burried in very un-intuitive text on a 'left click' button. Further more, what you are after is often burried deep in the navigation. Read on for an example... -The Noises!!!! The defaults drove me crazy!! 200 e-mails a day. I could have danced to the music the phone made. Every e-mail, every calendar invite the things buzzed beeped and chirped! It was killing the battery. I just needed to know if a phone call was coming in. The fun part was then turning the bleeps off! Read on for an example of crazy usability. -Turning off beeps I write this as an example of how bad it gets in places to do simple tasks It took me about 15 minutes to find out how to do an obvious function. 1) Navigate to item 15 using the roller ball 2) Click using the roller- ball. This opens the drop down menu with 4 big items, normal, vibrate, Quiet and Loud. You would think you then use that 'left click' button to edit. Wrong. 3) Carefull observe there is a tiny indicator that you can scroll beyond these basic options- not obvious. Select at the very bottom 'Advanced' option. Click using the roller ball 4)Observe a new list of profiles which you just saw in just a smaller menu this time!!! 5)Navigate to the profil you wish to edit- say 'Loud'. Now click with the roller ball. 6)If you didn't realise, the 12 different items on this screen from 'Browser' to 'Tasks' are all individual functions on the balckberry with their annoying beep associations. Get this, you need to edit each one to set your desired noise. Here's how 7) Select the functionality you wish to change the noise on, say 'Messenger- New Message'. Who named it 'messenger'!!! 8) You now have a dialogue with 11 options per beep function!!! Change volumne, tune, number of beeps, LED, vibrartions and number etc 9) Click 'Out of Holster' using the roller ball, None, vibrate, Tone or vibrate plus tone. 10) Select an option by clicking with the roller ball. 11) Change any of the other 11 options per function by going to step 9) 12) Use the navigate back button to force a save. Save dialogue then pops up. 13) Select the save or discard button using roller ball. 14) Now go back to step 7 and repeat to 14 another 11 times for the other default beep and tune settings for the default 'Loud' profile!!! ...another 15 minutes later... -The e-mail text you get back has lost all formatting so often you loose context and it is impossible to read. -The synchronization software using default installs on XP was slowing my machine start-up by 2 minutes, locking all access to the machine! It was the first thing I uninstalled. - I can go on but hopefully you guys get the drift and won't make the same mistake as me Final conclusion For new users I would wait until a decent user interface comes along that hooks up with Outlook and addresses primary needs. Also a user interface that tries to do core jobs well and not everything from navigating the internet on a 2 inch screen, playing games, GPS, music and so on. For BlackBerry, they need to clean up their usability, software performance and stability. If iPhone get easy sychronisation and backup with Outlook and Lotus Notes, Blackberry will die as soon as their contracts expire. Date: 2008-03-01 Best Phone Ever! I'm so glad I didn't buy an I-Phone. The Blackberry Curve is perfect. Took minutes to set-up. Date: 2008-02-27 Go ahead, ditch your home phone. No, really....ditch it! Although this phone is not perfect (what phone is?), I'll explain why this might be the smartest purchase you can make. Three letters. UMA. This technology enables access to GSM and GPRS mobile services over a WIFI connection at home, your office or a hotspot such as Starbucks. Although I live in the heart of Los Angeles, in my house, most mobile phones have problems with dropped calls, so like most people, I kept a home line. In my case Vonage. I always thought, if my cell worked really well, I would get rid of my home line. Only now will I do this and there are two reasons why. First, the Hotspot service allows me to communicate through my high-speed Internet connection at home and those minutes are unlimited. Second reason is the most important: The call quality is better than my home line. When there are pauses in conversation, I have to ask "are you there?" because its so silent and clean. For me, 1000 minutes are fine since most of my calls are from home. Although I might use about 5000 minutes, I'll only be charged when I'm out and thats covered in my 1000 plan. The sound quality is the same for UMA connections or if I'm on their towers, clean. I also want to say, I just returned an iPhone. Although that is a great phone, ATT just didn't work for me. Dropped calls in my home killed it. That and the iPhone just always seemed too fragile to carry around. I give high marks for its usability, but now that I have the Curve, I can appreciate one thing for sure: Actual keys for texting are much easier than a touch screen. As for features, I use the email push feature to notify me of anything in my gmail inbox, but downloaded googles package (free) that includes gmail and it works just great. Opera Mini browser also works well with this phone and the ball (mouse) is easy to get used to. Most people considering this phone probably know the features, so I really wanted to comment on performance and I will say this. I have never had a phone/service that was so crystal clear and the fact that phone calls when I get home are free, how can you beat that? My personal break down is this: Old Vonage line monthly cost: $28. Old Sprint Cell account (before trying ATT), data and text was about $120 for a total of about $148.00 My new plan is $39 for 1000 min, $10 for Hotspot, $20 for full blackberry data and $10 for 1000 text messages. for a total of $79.00/mo. I no longer need my home line so I am saving about $70/mo. To be fair, I will explain why i said its not perfect. Getting around the screen is better than most, but the iPhone does spoil you some. That being said, the pro's I've mentioned far outweigh the cons and at this point, all I miss about the iPhone is the toy-factor. But thats it. This phone, used as a phone, on the T-Mobile service blows them all away. I'm quite happy. Now I have to take it back and get it from Amazon since the deal here is way better than at the stores. Here is a little money saving tip. If you start your call from a wifi connection and travel into the T-Mobile towers, even though you are now on cell towers, you are charged based on the calls origination. Meaning, you can drive for hours with no time charges. That being said, if you arrive home from a call originating on the cells, and it transfers to wifi, you are still going to be charged minutes, so hang up and begin a new call at this point. Great phone. I'm very happy!!! Date: 2008-02-21 Erica Asahan fav fon Erica Asahan wrote: Okay, this phone is crazy!!!! I dropped it in the toilet and it quit working???! Help! I love it so much I wished they came out with it in 2000, It could have come in handy!!!
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