Deal Hot Stuff

Tag : blackberry 8320, myfaves phone, curve titanium, t mobile

Company : BlackBerry List Price : $349.99 Amazon Price : Too low to display Used Price : Average customer review :

Features

• Smallest, lightest BlackBerry with full QWERTY keyboard–weighs just 3.9 ounces
• Wi-Fi connectivity for Web browsing and access to T-Mobile’s Hotspot @Home unlimited calling service
• 2.0 megapixel camera with flash and 5x digital zoom; Bluetooth wireless connectivity with with stereo headset support
• Next-generation media player with audio and video playback in a variety of formats; expandable via MicroSD memory cards
• Includes: Battery, Charger, Stereo Hands-free Headset, USB Cable, Carrying Case and BlackBerry Desktop Software

Amazon.com Product Description

Adding a fashionable touch to Research in Motion’s formidable arsenal of telephonic, PIM, and media tools, the BlackBerry 8320 Curve for T-Mobile is also the smallest, lightest BlackBerry phone that includes a full QWERTY keyboard. This amalgam of the svelte BlackBerry Pearl and the more business-oriented 8800 combines RIM’s long-valued corporate email and messaging platform with a host of advanced multimedia features, including a 2-megapixel camera and stereo Bluetooth (for listening to music via wireless headphones). In addition to its quad-band GSM and EDGE connectivity, it also offers Wi-Fi connectivity for access to the Internet and email as well as access to T-Mobile’s Hotspot @Home service. This version comes in titanium, but it’s also available in pale gold.

The Curve’s full QWERTY keyboard and the innovative trackball navigation system (placed above the keyboard) makes accessing your data and writing email a breeze..

The 2-megapixel camera makes it easy to capture pictures to send via email or upload to your online photo collection. T-Mobile Service Options
With T-Mobile HotSpot @Home service, you’ll effortlessly transition between Wi-Fi calling and T-Mobile’s wireless network while you talk. You can get unlimited nationwide calls over Wi-Fi–at home via your wireless router or at any U.S. T-Mobile HotSpot. You can also use the HotSpot @Home service via most open, or unsecured, wireless routers, as well as any secured wireless router for which you have access to the password from the owner. This phone is compatible with the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi standard as well as the following wireless security protocols: WEP, WPA (TKIP), WPA2 (AES-CCMP), LEAP, PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-FAST, EAP-SIM, EAP-AKA. Whenever you’re not using a Wi-Fi network, the Curve works just like a regular mobile phone, using your Whenever Minutes under your T-Mobile voice plan.

This phone also includes compatibility with T-Mobile’s myFaves service, which allows you to call up to five of your most common contacts–on any network, even landlines–without using any of your minutes. Learn more about myFaves from T-Mobile.

Staying Connected
With BlackBerry’s push email technology, your email will find you without having to initiate a connection. BlackBerry devices are designed to remain on and continuously connected to the wireless network, notifying you as new email arrives. In addition to the text, you can also receive and view attachments in a wide range of popular file formats, including Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect, and Adobe PDF.

Browse the web with the integrated, full-featured browser, which quickly and efficiently displays HTML pages as well as enables you to set up RSS feeds to stay connected to up-to-the-minute news and blog posts. And keep up with your contacts using a variety of instant message (IM) networks, including the integrated Blackberry Messenger as well as downloadable clients for Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, and Lotus Sametime.

For corporate users, the Curve delivers all the enterprise email and messaging capabilities you’ve come to expect. It’s supported on BlackBerry Internet Service, giving you access to up to 10 work or personal email accounts (including most popular ISP email accounts), as well as BlackBerry Enterprise Server, enabling advanced security and IT administration within IBM Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise environments.

Phone Features

Click for larger view. The Curve is fashioned in a liquid silver finish with chrome highlights and subtly curving corners. Measuring 4.2 x 2.4 inches, the Curve is just as slim as the Pearl (0.6 inches) and weighs in at 3.9 ounces–just 0.7 ounces heavier than its predecessor. It features a bright 2.5-inch color TFT screen that provides 65,000 colors and a 320 x 240-pixel resolution, and it includes a light-sensing feature that automatically adjusts backlighting for indoor, outdoor and dark environments. Like the BlackBerry 8800, the Curve includes a trackball navigation system located on the top of the QWERTY keypad, and it also features an integrated spell checker with a customizable dictionary to help maintain accuracy while on the go. It has 64 MB of internal ROM memory, and is expandable using MicroSD memory cards. The battery provides up to 4 hours (240 minutes) of talk time and up to 17 days (408 hours) of standby time.

You can snap vivid photos (though no video) using the 2-megapixel camera on the back of the Curve, which also features a 5x digital zoom, built-in flash, self-portrait mirror and full screen viewfinder. It can capture images in up to three picture quality and size resolutions that can be shared instantly by email, MMS or BlackBerry Messenger, or even uploaded to your Flickr account with the Yahoo! Go service. Photos can also be immediately set as a unique caller ID or Home Screen image. You can edit photos and create albums within the Curve using the PhotoSuite application. Pictures can be cropped, rotated and straightened, and flaws can be fixed by removing redeye or changing the brightness, contrast, and saturation levels.

Listen to your favorite music and watch downloaded videos using the included stereo headset, or use an optional wireless headphone thanks to the Curve’s support for the Bluetooth stereo audio profile (A2DP/AVRCP). The Curve is compatible with a wide variety of file formats, including MP3, WMA and AAC/AAC+/eAAC+ audio and WMV, MPEG4 and H.263 video. Dedicated volume controls are conveniently located on the side of the handset.

With the Voice-Activated Dialing (VAD) feature, you can initiate a call just by telling the Curve who to call from your contact list–either via the integrated speakerphone or using an optional Bluetooth wireless headset. Other advanced phone features include advanced sound technology that cancels out background noise and echo, dedicated volume and mute keys, and the ability to customize the Curve with polyphonic and MP3 ringtones.

Vital Statistics
The Blackberry Curve 8320 weighs 3.92 ounces and measures 4.2 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches. Its lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 4 hours of talk time, and up to 408 hours (17 days) of digital standby time. It runs on the 850/900/1800/1900 GSM/GPRS/EDGE frequencies.

Customer reviews

Great Blackberry, crippled only by T-mobile
This review is for the Blackberry 8320 Curve by T-Mobile. A device is only as good as its service provider - in this case unfortunately T-mobile is a poor one. I received this BB only a few days ago with much excitement. It permits you to pull corporate mail, connect to a wi-fi router to make VOIP based calls and other great features - too many to list.

I had chosen the $19.99 Blackberry Internet Service plan for 10 ISP based emails (POP3/IMAP), Internet browsing (though mainly WAP, not true HTML - BB’s proxy servers strip out rich content) and Instant Messaging clients (AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Windows Live messenger). Though you need to spring another $10 to pull corporate mail from your company’s BES server, you still can pull work mail if your company permits browser based email access. By this I mean Outlook Web Access (i.e. https://mail.yourcompany.com/exchange). The extra $10 does buy you instant ‘push’ email, whereas OWA access does have a 10-15 minute delay. If you can live with this small setback, then you should be fine with the $19.99 BIS plan.

Once I received my BB 8320, I realized that reception was very poor inside my house (1-2 bars, fluctuating quite a bit as well). The purpose of T-mobile providing three types of UMA (unlicensed mobile access) based phones to subscribers is that they know their network has poor performance, especially inside buildings. Signing up for their $19.99 Hotspot@home service allows you to connect to your home router (provided by T-mobile) and any of their 8000 Hotspot locations in Starbucks nation wide. I myself did not sign up for the Hotspot@home service, but just connected to my own home wi-fi router. This seemed to work well, but was intermittent and in the end unreliable. I noticed that connecting to my home wi-fi router caused alot of connection failures for my laptops and desktops. The phone is smart enough to figure out when to switch out of GSM/GPRS and onto wi-fi where available.

On the positive side, I did have full bars (all 5) on 395-N and at my Washington, D.C. office. Even though their signal seems strong in a good amount of areas, not having a reliable signal at home really does drive one crazy.

In the end I feel that my 3 star rating for this product is justified due to the fact that the BB device is great, but falls short of strong performance due to its marriage to T-mobile. I used to have a T-mobile Sidekick (only data, no voice plan) 4 years ago and it was plagued by poor reception at my college. Thought maybe 4 long years was enough for T-mobile to get their act together….should have known better.

An iPhone killer?
OK - this phone is not perfect. But I am very happy I added two years to my sentence with TMO and upgraded to the curve. Not only has RIM improved on the blackberry interface but the ability to add a microSD card (I added 4gigs) makes it a great media player. Now, I know it does not come close to the interface of an iPod, but seriously who cares! Using Missing Sync I was able to sync a playlist directly from iTunes and a photo book directly from iPhoto! It supports stereo bluetooth (something the iPhone doesn’t) and it has an actual keyboard which is something that comes in handy if you type a lot of SMS, emails or use the internet on your phone.

At home the curve connects to my home network and gets me off that painful EDGE network for data and VoIP. This has also come in handy in office buildings where reception on TMO’s network was not adequate.

The only thing that really bugs me is that the camera is very slow taking pictures.

I highly recommend this device!

Its good but…
The T-Mobile Blackberry 8320 is good, especially the WiFi easy-breezy automatic connections. Its no-muss no fuss to set up wifi and the system recognizes whether to switch on Wifi automatically almost everywhere I go. The web browser find Internet links in usable time - unlike my old Treo. The screen is bright and beautiful and the keyboard very functional.

Three things which still need some work, however, before it gets 5 stars.

1. One cannot download bookmarks, it appears, direct from IE to the browser, a fact which is a real pain. A simple thing but frustrating.

2. Although this phone has moved towards multimedia, I still can’t get the video or audio to play with standard formats from the usual internet websites, such as those for radio or YouTube. There is no RealAudio, QuickTime or equivalent app which can be downloaded for blackberries and the media player system which is bundled with the phone seems very limited.

3. Lastly the memory allows little space for multimedia so you also need to buy a memory card for any music etc.

Other than these points, its a good phone.

Best yet, but not perfect
Switched by 7800G for the Curve. The keyboard is the same as the 7800G which is good. The new features are great - I use the MP3 player, phone and voice dialling. The phone seems more well made than previously blackberries.

The one negative is I have had experience with the phone freezing when getting calls. Eventually I see an exception/error on the screen.

The Best BlackBerry
It has been a very long time since I have had so much fun with a smartphone. In fact I would include Palms, Jornadas, and the much missed and lamented Newton to the mix The BlackBerry 8320 was amazingly easy to get up and running with PocketMac. This isn’t always the case with some other BB’s. I was particularly pleased to discover that OperaMini installed and performed flawlessly. There has been much talk on various boards claiming that T-Mobile has deliberately set their phones so that they won’t run third party apps. My experience says otherwise.

The fact that the 8320 has WiFi was a huge selling point for me. Our house is located in what may very will be the most cell signal challenged spot in the county. This BB instantly located our AirPort signal and I was finally able to to make calls from home, via the UMA feature. Emails load very quickly, and it performs like a real champ when it’s time to send a SMS or MMS. The screen is very bright and clear. It does a reasonably good job in direct sunlight, but then I have yet to find a phone whose screen delivers as promised in that area. It is also very sharp and easy to see. That’s quite an accomplishment considering my poor eyesight. The 2.0 megapixel camera is pretty useful with it’s zoom and flash abilities. Under the right set of circumstances it’s capable of producing some pretty good photos. It also has a SD card slot so that you can store larger media files, or whatever else your heart desires. The web browsing experience is better than you you might expect. It also features voice dialing. I was impressed liked the phone’s search function. I don’t know if it is typical of other BlackBerries, but I found it to be extremely fast and very useful.

The reception is better than other phones that I have owned in the past. It it also very good looking and feels solidly made. The rubberized sides give the 8320 an extra secure grip. Finally, the real QWERTY keyboard is (for me at last) a huge improvement over the Pearl’s Sure Type system. The keys are raised and separated just enough to make typing quickly possible, and this from a serious klutz. It also has spell check as part of it’s core programming. That is something I desperately need.

When the iPhone first hit the scene I felt left out of the party because T-Mobile wouldn’t be a seller. But I have had nothing other than positive experiences with T-Mobile. I don’t work for or have any financial interest in the company, so I can honestly state that T-Mobile tech support ranks right up there with Apple. So why should I surrender that comfort level to try someone new? Also, I have read many, many bad things about AT&T customer service.

The release of the BlackBerry 8320 has taken the sting out the iPhone’s release, and has provided me with a wonderfully functional, enjoyable & reliable prosumer’s dream of a BlackBerry.