David Flynn24 March 2009, 7:00 AM
RIM’s new smartphone brings Bold features and design to the Curve family, although the 8900 remains a GSM-only phone. But what about those rumours of a 3G ‘Curve 9300’…?
Update: the Curve 8900 has now been launched through Vodafone – read our report for full details on price and availability.
Looking to upgrade your beaten and battered BlackBerry Curve 8300, or maybe even hoping to step up from the classic but aged 8700 series? The new Curve 8900 may be the answer, as long as you don’t want 3G into the bargain.
The Curve 8900 will be unveilled to Australia’s tech media next Wednesday at RIM’s recently opened North Sydney offices. No carrier has been announced, although Optus and Vodafone are both candidates. Expect a no-show from Telstra, which wants Next G and nothing but.
Pricing won’t be announced until each carrier adds the 8900 to its line-up, and as is the norm for the BlackBerry, the handset will be available only through each carrier under a contract. Local online store Mobicity has already listed the Curve 8900 online for
$809, although this is an imported model with branding from the US and European carrier T-Mobile.
The lack of 3G in favour of
ye old GSM is about the only curve ball that RIM’s fresh-baked smartphone throws to the BlackBerry crowd. Previously codenamed Javelin, the new Curve melds the form factor and mid-market positioning of the original 8300 series with the design and consumer features of the Bold 9000.
For instance, the 8900 retains the keyboard layout of the 8300 with a pronounced gap between each key, although the primary buttons control buttons and trackball have the same oversized and flush-set approach as the Bold.
The Curve 8900 (left) sports the separated keys of the 8300 rather than the close-set keys of the Bold 9000 (at right)
The 8900 also cuts back on the silver-chrome finesses of the Bold 9000, with a plastic panel running down both sides ad along the bottom rather than all the way around the chassis as well as cutting across the top of the scalloped keyboard.
GPS and Wi-Fi are both built-in, while the BlackBerry OS 4.6 includes everything from the Bold’s slicker UI to support for HTML email, an enhanced media player with iTunes synchronisation plus Documents to Go for viewing and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
The Curve 8900 also gets the improved BlackBerry Bold micro-browser, although this is of little use over a slow GSM connection.
To drive the added UI and multimedia load the 8900’s powerplant has been upgraded to a 512MHz Xscale processor, up from the 8300’s 312MHz chip. Battery life also gets a boost, with the the 1000 mAh cell of the Curve 8300 making way for a 1400 mAh battery which RIM rates at a peak 5.5 hours of talk time and 15 days on standby.
In some areas the Curve 8900 even bests the Bold. The 2.4 inch 480 × 360 HVGA+ display is not only larger than the 320 x 240 panel of the original 8300, it boasts higher resolution than the Bold’s 480 x 320 pixel display. Ditto the digital camera, which packs a 3.2 megapixel lens over the 2.0 megapixel sensor of the Bold and the Curve 8300.
The Curve 8900 has little on-board RAM, however, so storing music and video will fall to a microSD memory card of up to 16GB capacity.
The Curve 8900 is packed with 'Berry goodness, if you can overlook the lack of 3G
Representing an impressive step up from the two year old Curve 8300, the lack of 3G is about all that could cruel the 8900 in Australia. GSM is still acceptable for email due to RIM’s highly efficient email compression, but you can forget about using the 8900 for any other online task such as Google Maps or a quick bit of Web browsing.
While the Curve 8900 has just about everything but 3G, road warriors may want to hold out for the rumoured Curve 9300, currently taking shape in RIM’s Canadian skunkworks under the codename of Gemini.
As the flagged 9300 model number indicates, this new handset will be built on the same platform as the Bold 9000. That means 3G with HSDPA 3.6 on the 2100MHz (3G) and 850MHz (Next G) bands, although there’s no word if 900MHz could be added to this roster to accommodate for the expansion of the Optus and Vodafone 3G networks.
The Gemini is also expected to shift to the Bold’s triple-core Marvell 624MHz ARM ‘Tavor’ Xscale processor.
“Tavor is a triple core architecture, while Hermione (the 312MHz ARM processor in the Pearl, Curve and 8800) was a single core that had to do all the work” explains Mike McAndrews, RIM’s Vice President for Product Marketing. “With Tivor one core can be running applications, another handling a call, another handling digital signal processing during the call. So to save battery life you can shut down a core if it’s not needed”.
The rest of the Gemini’s specs are certain to equal or best those of the Curve 8900, and although there’s no date on the release of this next-gen BlackBerry, we’re tipping a Q4 arrival into Australia.