First Look: BlackBerry’s Curvaceous new pocket rocket

Facing a flurry of smartphones boasting business-class mobile email as well as consumer-minded multimedia, RIM today climbed back into the ring with the new Blackberry Curve, aka the model 8300.

Curves are good: especially when they graft handy multimedia features onto a QWERTY device

Available in mid-July, the Curve neatly slots in between the mainstream ‘candybar' form of the Pearl and RIM's conventional QWERTY-style enterprise handhelds such as the 8700 and 8800 series - and, as you'd expect, it brings with it the best that both families have to offer, and then some. RIM says it will cost about the same as the current Blackberry Pearl.

We've had a Curve hiding in our pocket for the past fortnight, so here are our first impressions of what you'll want to know.

First up, it combines the tiny white trackball of the Pearl (which reduces BlackBerry thumb strain and makes the device southpaw-friendly) with the QWERTY keypad that's so loved by mobile email mavens - the ones who fire off emails and hammer out SMS messages rather than just read what's landed in their inbox.

While this combo also exists in the 8800, RIM has redesigned the Curve's keyboard to that it's far superior to that of the oft-criticised 8800. There keys once again have a gap between them rather than being squeezed hard-up against each other, which made typing on the the 8800 significantly harder and noticeably slower.

Evolution of a keyboard: RIM went from the nicely-shaped and nicely-spaced keys of the 8700 family...

 

Tight fit: to the smaller and crammed-together keys of the 8800, which hampered speed and accuracy...

Spaced out: The seperation of the keys on the 8300 Curve show RIM listened to feedback from frustrated mobile emailers

The keyboard layout has an upward curve, but it's as much this trait as the gently rounded edges of the buffed silver chassis which give the 8300 its fancy name. Those finesses help the Curve look quite smaller than the 8800, although side by side it has an almost identical footprint: it's just 7mm shorter, 6mm less across the face and 1.5mm in profile, and only 25 grams lighter on the scale. The displays are identical, with a 2.5in panel running at 320 x 240.

Other consumer-minded traits include the Pearl's digital camera, but now enhanced to 2 megapixels with a 5x digital zoom: the quality is on par with the average cameraphone and still lags what you'd get on an up-scale Samsung, Sony or Nokia. The revamped media player now sports search capabilities, while you can plug in your favourite headphones through a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

Music and video are stored on a microSD card, which isn't included. While the slot remains buried under the battery, with 2GB microD cards costing around $35 you'd rarely need to swap out the wafer. You can also run the Curve in ‘mass-storage mode' so that it becomes an oversized and overpriced flash memory drive through which you can drag-and-drop files onto the microSD card.

The process of moving media onto the card is made a little easier with the bundled Roxio Media Manager for BlackBerry program, which ships as part of the updated BlackBerry Desktop Software v4.2 Service Pack 2. The good news? It handles everything from CD ripping and playlist management to transcoding music and video into BlackBerry-optimised size and formats including AVI, DivX, Xvid and WMV, as long as your PC has the right codecs already loaded. It even manages your MP3 ringtones. The bad news Yes, we said ‘PC' in that last sentence: this is a Windows-only program.

The battery itself is BlackBerry's standard 3.7 volt 900mAH cell, so the Cure continues to enjoy the same long uptime between charges as its siblings, as long as you don't overdo the multimedia playback (and especially if you're beaming it to stereo Bluetooth 2.0 headset).

You can also put a tick against the voice-activated dialling of the Pearl and 8800, which is activated by a button inset on the left side panel and proved surprisingly accurate for new numbers as well a names already in the address book. However, while the vaunted ‘noise-cancellation technology' did slightly damp down steady background noise such as a road traffic, the Curve's speaker lacks the audio punch of previous models - so while the other party can hear you a little better in a slightly noisy environment, you'll have trouble making them out unless you plug in a headset.

While the core apps remain the same (and we're still wishing a world time clock would join them), the email client now boasts a spellchecker in addition to the oft-overlooked AutoText (which works like Word's feature of the same name and can be used to correct typos ad well as expand compete words from shorthand abbreviations).

For our money, the Curve is the sweetest BlackBerry yet. That doesn't make it perfect: all models except the 8707g, the Curve operates on the GSM/EDGE network rather than the zippier 3G. The quad-band coverage makes it a good travelling companion, especially if you use a Bluetooth GPS module to feed into the BlackBerry Maps app (or download your own third-party set, which would be our suggestion). And RIM's superbly efficient compression makes fast work of emails and attachments. Even so, we did notice the Curve had a little less pep in general Web browsing than the 3G-equipped BlackBerry 8707g.

But if we were to pick just one BlackBerry as the best of the bunch, the Curve would be it.