Great Blackberry, crippled only by T-mobile | BlackBerry Curve 8320 Smartphone Titanium (T-Mobile)

An iPhone killer? | BlackBerry Curve 8320 Smartphone Titanium (T-Mobile)

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	• BlackBerry Curve 8320 Smartphone Titanium (T-Mobile) BlackBerry BlackBerry, 2007 average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent phone; smaller than expected

Been using the phone for 5 days now and I love it. No problems yet. Thus far, I really like:

*very small and light
*excellent call quality (better than my previous Nokia)
*bright, clear screen
*relatively quick navigation between screens
*stereo headphones and carrying case included in package
*excellent T mobile customer service (they helped me fix a problem I had installing the blackberry desktop software)

The only cons I can think of right now are:
*have to buy a microSD card to store media
*sometimes the phone lags between screens (as all computers do)
*battery life may be an issue after busy days
*can't get bluetooth to work with my computer (most likely due to the computer, not the phone)

I was choosing between the iPhone and the curve. After borrowing an iPhone and playing with the Curve in the store, I chose the Curve for it's functionality and lesser price. I'm very happy with the decision.

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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.

My main gripe with T-mobile is that their network does not have good coverage within buildings. Not all buildings that I happen to be in a given day have open wifi access points - this unfortunately makes the UMA feature unusable. The fact that T-mobile's network is solely on the 1900mhz GSM spectrum, and not also 850mhz is likely the reason why building penetration is poor. On a few occasions where I had full bars, I was unable to make an outgoing call up until my 3rd attempt. Also, while standing in line at Potbelly's where I had full bars - I was unable to make an outgoing call to a friend's cell phone (got the 'circuits busy' message). As a paying wireless subscriber, I feel that my $70/mth plan should amount to some sort of guarantee that I will be able to place a call when needed.

On the positive side, I did have good coverage in most of the DC metropolitan area including 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. I really like the phone itself. It is very light and easy to use - OS performance is quick and reactive. Keyboard feedback is also very good, didn't take me too long to adjust from a regular phone to typing on this BB. As mentioned earlier there is a multitude of applications already installed and further on there are alot of 3rd party applications that are available online for free. The speaker phone was very clear and audible. Having the myFaves deal is great if you speak to specific friends/loved ones alot - keep in mind that you are limited to 5 people and that you can update these numbers only once every billing cycle. Setup of email was quick and painless, everything gets pushed immediately except for my corporate email (as mentioned above).

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.

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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!

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How Wi-Fi Works with 8320

First off, this is a great BlackBerry device that compares with any other BlackBerry device. Let's be honest: What you are interested in is how this phone works with VoIP over Wi-Fi. Okay, T-Mobile does offer the add-on "Hotspot@Home" service that allows unlimited calling when you choose to talk through the Wi-Fi network, but this is purely an option. This phone will still use Wi-Fi (or UMA), at the places you can access Wi-Fi, instead of using the T-Mobile cellular network... you'll just be using your plan minutes if you don't add on that unlimited option.

But, how does it actually work? Think of your home Wi-Fi router becoming another cellular tower. All cell phones "hand off" your call from one tower to the next as you drive down the highway. But with a UMA phone like this one, your home (or work) Wi-Fi becomes yet another available "tower" for your call to be handed to and from. So, start a call on Wi-Fi and walk out to the door, your call is automatically handed off to the T-Mobile tower without you noticing a thing. Started a call in your car on the way home? As soon as you walk in your front door, the call is automatically handed off to your Wi-Fi router seamlessly. As far as the phone and T-Mobile is concerned, it is no different than just driving further down the road to the next cellular tower. Yes, the phone easily connects even if your Wi-Fi requires a login (like most hotels) or the Wi-Fi signal requires WEP or WPA authentication.

I've been using my new phone for about one week and I've already burned through 250 minutes of my unlimited "Hotspot@Home" voice time through Wi-Fi, which before would have counted against my available plan minutes. You can't argue with the bottom line: this phone pays for itself almost overnight!

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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.

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