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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone Titanium (AT&T) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone Titanium (AT&T) Reviews (cont...)Date: 2008-05-18 Bad choice. Crashes all the time It looks nice, but the buttons are very small and hard to press. Besides, they do not look like they will last for 3 or 4 months after using the phone. Does not capture video.. So?? The worst thing is the white screen. Very often, you are talking on the phone, you hang up, and here you go.. Surprise, you get a white screen vertical blue columns.. The phone still works though, but when you get a phone call, you are not able to tell who is calling.. So you either have to reboot the phone, which is long.. Or you have to wait for like 5 minutes.. Nothing like Nokia.. Canadians??? please.. they say thx to the ATM machine. Date: 2008-04-27 Don't buy this phone! GPS is $9.99 per month subscription, PLUS a data plan from your wireless provider. You can browse the internet, but again you HAVE to have a data plan, or YOU WILL PAY BIG! Changing your ringtones and SMS message alert tone are DIFFICULT. There is no option menu to do this simple task from; You have to do it from the media folder. I am VERY dissapointed with this phone! The camera is nice and of good quality. No video recording capabilities though. I upgraded from an OLD nokia phone and regret it. Date: 2008-04-24 Why such an offer?? As I am not buying, so my "star rating" is meaningless - just to satisfy Amazon's requirements. This gold box offer has all the signs of a desperate attempt by RIM, et al. to unload product inventory which is about to be made obsolete by some market-busting new technology coming online. As they say, if it sounds too good to be true, then it is. Also, a reviewer's point about GPS being a double-edged sword if always with you and turned on, is worth considering. Date: 2008-04-05 Worst Phone I ever have This is my first time to use Blackberry and it gave me realy bad experience. Dont go for Curve if you wanna to use it for call conferencing. 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.
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