Rim BlackBerry Curve 8520 Smartphone

If this curve was a woman I would be drooling.  I just migrated from an 8330 (trackball style) to an 8520 (touchpad style) flawlessly by backing up and restoring.  The only extra step I had to take was to log in to the Blackberry network with my username and password and click on transfer to migrate my e-mails from the old curve to the new one.  Once I did that all five of my e-mails worked as expected.

FIRST IMPRESSION:

Wow this phone is actually lighter and it has Wi-fi to connect through wireless modems.  I am jumping for joy.   Blackbery actually keeps making the curve sexier.  One handed usage is easy and comfortable.  Display is sharp clean and easy to read.  Menus are easy to navigate through and personalization is better than the previous models, You can actually have the phone ring and vibrate simultaneously versus vibrate then ring and you can make your font tinier than before for those of us with good eye sight, this allows you to place more information on the screen. 

If you want to change an operation of a button you can.  If you want to sort something differently you can.  If you need to tweak a display go for it.  You can even change your typing language on they fly, for billingual usage.  If you desire to change it modify it or just customize it you probably can.   The down side, only two profiles came installed on it so expect a common look.

The changes I couldn't make but wanted to:

1.  Scrolling through the full phone list on the address book, I wanted to see name and phone number.  The only choice is name and company.  You have to click the persons name to see the phone number.

LEARNING CURVE:

Being a prior blackberry curve owner it took me 2 hours to get this phone perfect for me.  If you are a first timer to black berry I would expect about 8 hours to fully familiarize yourself with this phone.  The great thing about this phone is that blackberry is getting it right and listens to its customers.  They have now provided you with small hard copy books and a shortcut key guide. 

The feature that I think is under used or misunderstood by most blackberry users is how to use standby verses locking the phone.  If you hold in the mute key the phone goes to stand by which essentially freezes the phone, you simply hold in the mute key to bring it back. This is better then putting the phone on key lock and having to use two hands to get it out of lock.

INSTANT MESSAGING:

This phone comes preloaded with BlackBerry instant messaging and you can download google, aim or yahoo.

TELEPHONE:

Touchpad took about 5 min to get use to it.  Then I turned on the audible click sound and I mastered it.  Sound quality is improved from previous curves both in your ear and when utilizing the speaker phone.  It has voice activated dialing which I do not use because I have people that I call often programmed to a favorite key.

The biggest bummer is that you will need all new accessories the old curve used USB Mini-A and the new 8520 uses USB Micro-B the connection/charging port is no longer the same.  A converter will cost you $ 10 and a new cable $ 2.  I am unsure if you can buy converters to work with your charger so you will probably get stuck buying all new chargers or if you are very thrifty and you are changing from an old curve the battery is the same so you can use your old phone to charge the battery then transfer it to your phone when charged : )

INTERNET:

Something about blackberry makes the internet connection fly.  I find it to be very fast and acceptable.  Loading weather.com with the phone on BB browser took 3 seconds because it opened the mobile version of their website.   When I changed the browser configuration to emulate firefox so it attempted to open the full 250k version of the page I was able to read most of the text in about 25 seconds and the page was fully loaded in 50 seconds. I was a bit disappointed until I used it on Wi-Fi then it worked great.    I strongly recommend that you use your shortcut keys.  G for go to... is the one I use the most.

MANAGING DOCUMENTS

I was able to view word and excel documents, unfortunately you have to pay for an extra application to be able to edit them.  I was also unable to view .pdf documents out of the box I will be adding that application soon.

SETUP of SYNC:

It Was very simple to set up to sync on my desktop with my outlook.  The first time I used it years ago it took me an hour to figure it all out.  Most recently I had an error when synchronizing that showed one contact was not synchronizing.  There was a total of 1 record(s) skipped during the synchronization as summarized below:  The fix:  I had a contact in outlook with no data on it.  I deleted it and if fixed the problem.

Camera:
Typical 2 mp cell phone camera this time they took away the flash so it is actually worse.  They also eliminated the little mirror under the lens so you can take a picture of yourself easily by looking at your reflection.

Battery life:
Note I use my phone 2,000 minutes a month.  My battery life expectation is very different than most.  My BB is my computer on the road.  This one is an ouch line for me.  I don't get a full work day use out of it.  The plus side is that it recharges fast from a plug or my computer using the synchronization cable provided. I would like to see a bigger battery the phone is very slim it could use some meat with a battery twice the size.  I'm even willing to pay for it.

Conclusion:

I love this phone I was actually considering going back to a motorolla Q series to directly sinc with a microsoft server.  But a new one was not available so I will live with this phone.  It is nice to see that some companies really do listen to their customers and improve upon their products on every release.

Thank you for reading my review and Smile induce Pleasure!