Blackberry Curve 9300 3G – so what’s new?
Blackberry Curve 9300 3G – so what’s new?
The BlackBerry Curve 9300 3G is the newest handset to come from the RIM team; it is a mid-ramge handset pitched halfway between the business mobile phone user and the consumer.
The Curve 9300 is not expensive and is designed to help those who have not yet converted to a smartphone to take the leap with this cost effective option.
It has 3G connectivity as well as Wi-Fi, and promises fast internet browsing while apps and themes can be easily downloaded from the BlackBerry App World (which has recently just been updated).
Visually there is not much to report, the Blackberry Curve 9300 looks a lot like many previous Blackberry’s with the QWERTY keyboard and rounded corners. In look sit is very similar to the Blackberry Curve 8900 while it is being pitched as the newer, quicker Blackberry 9700.
Now for a look under the hood:
There is a microUSB port sitting alongside the 3.5mm headphone connection and the left-hand convenience key, which has a default option set to the voice-dialer shortcut.
The camera button is situated on the other side just by the volume controls.
On the top of the phone are the media controls – play/pause, skip forwards and skip back. This signals the intention of RIM to pitch the 9300 3G as a media player as well as a business mobile phone.
The BlackBerry Curve 9300 3G offers a range of connectivity options to keep business mobile phone users up and running wherever you are, with Wi-Fi and GPS along with its namesake 3G network.
The 2-megapixel camera is a bit of a disappointment and lacks consistency with the rest of this media focused phone, the flash and autofocus on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 are much better.
The Blackberry Curve 3G 9300 has great quality email abilities as with the other Blackberry models, also the BlackBerry Messenger for instant messaging other BlackBerry users for next-to-nothing is a great function to have especially if you use Blackberrys across your business.
The homescreen icons can be customised to whatever your most-used apps, functions and web shortcuts are, and the full menu is easy to organise into folders.
The menu is made up of rows of icons but this is supplemented by webs of text-based menus to navigate through within applications. You can adjust settings, carry out functions and put the knife to applications. At first the choices available in the menus can be intimidating and may take new Blackberry users a while to get used to. The idea is that you can get to your favourite applications as quickly as possible and the Blackberry curve 9300 does achieve this so all is not lost – just depends on your patience!
As I am a little late getting around to this post it is important to note that the Blackberry OS6 will be updated within the next few days – on October 14th to be precise so with the update we can expect great improvements in connection speeds and functionality. I will do a seperate post on the upgrade.
As with all Blackberrys the BlackBerry App World now has thousands of good quality apps that can easily be accessed from the phones main navigation.
You can also customise your themes through buying themes from designers or build your own, using different fonts, background images, ringtones and the like.
Most standard functions of the handset are very easy to launch. To make a call you can either hit the call button, or simply start typing a number or name of a contact from the homescreen.
It is a bit of a hassle to write a new text message as you cannot simply go to your inbox and be presented with an obvious option to compose a new message, you have to launch the internal menu by hitting the BlackBerry button, then scroll through the list of options ’til you reach ‘Compose SMS’. However, you can also launch an SMS from the contacts section too.
It’s easy to make calls, end calls and to hang up a call, you don’t have to wait for the sometimes-slow proximity sensor to kick in and give you the option.
Sound quality on the Blackberry Curve 3G 9300 is excellent which is obviously a vital necessity for the business mobile phone user. Voices could easily be heard and background noise didn’t interrupt or distort the conversation as with some phones.
The reception was generally good and only got weaker in the well known black holes that some of our friends habitate in.
The phone book is a heavyweight. It’s quite texty but you can add photos to your contacts. It wasn’t that easy to synch our facebook friends to our Blackberry contacts so not great socially.
To make up for it, you have seemingly endless options when setting up new contacts, from nicknames, job titles and home and work addresses, to birthdays and relevant webpages.
This might be information overkill for the non business user, but if you’re syncing the handset with your Outlook account, then this is a great function as much of your data can be automatically saved by the BlackBerry Curve 9300 3G.
You can also group your contacts into easily manageable related groups so that they are easier to get group messages to so useful for seperating your teams/employees as well as your social contacts.
There is a good search functionality on the homescreen for finding your contacts – you simply start typing their name and then you will be displayed with a list of contacts from which to choose from – click and you start dialling!
You can slao assign a fast dial function to 23 of the 26 alphabetical QWERTY keys so great for rapid dialling your most used contacts. You can also set the default contact option at a person by person level from calling to emailing.
BlackBerry gained their competitive advantage through their superior email functionality and the Blackberry 3G 9300 is no traitor to this tradition. To set up a webmail account just put in your address and password. You can synch your contacts as you add them with your Blackberry address book.
If you want you can re-route all of your emails and texts to one central inbox which is useful for rapid management of messages but if you are active on multiple email addresses then this can become quite a confusing function.
The other great messaging function that all BlackBerry handsets offer is BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). This means free texting to other Blackberry users.
The BlackBerry Curve 3G’s QWERTY keyboard is good, but nothing special with no improvements on previous models; its raised buttons are better than the the flat slide-out QWERTYs found on some phones but it is overshadowed by the sharply angled keys of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 which makes it a little easier to cock up the typing.
Automatic text correction was generally doing it’s intuitive job, and those of you who work in an aggressive foul mouthed office environment will be chuffed to hear you can continue your office culture on the BlackBerry Curve 3G 9300. All you’ll have to contend with is the disapproving underlining of the more offensive curses rather than automatic corrections.
The internet browser on BlackBerry OS 5, which will be running on the BlackBerry Curve 3G at launch, is well known to be pretty crappy. It’s slow to open web pages, even slower to render images, only offers one tab at a time and is generally a bit of a pest to use, hopefully OS 6 will put an end to this!
When browsing you really have to make good use of the zoom function in order to see smaller images and read any text. Zooming in to get a better view of text tends to be quite smooth, although we were often left with extremely jaggedy pixellated images after a zoom-in.
The optical track pad gives you more freedom to move the cursor around the web page than a D-pad would, although it did tend to be overly responsive, making selecting that tiny little link a real hassle.
It also comes in handy when you want to select text to copy and paste on the BlackBerry Curve 3G, as you can grab massive chunks of text in one quick swipe.
Sharing links is very easy, which is a great function for passing advice and tips to your clients and colleagues. It is an option in the browser’s menu. You can choose to send the link in an email, via SMS, MMS or BlackBerry Messenger. The other standard feature is the inclusion of bookmarks, and you can organise these by named folders to keep things tidy.
The camera on the BlackBerry Curve 3G is a pretty poor affair. When you launch the camera app, the only options you’re offered onscreen are to zoom in or out, and take the picture. If you need a good camera for work then this is not the business mobile phone for you.
To fiddle around with the (admittedly limited) options requires you to click the BlackBerry button and enter another of those text-heavy menus. Here you can play around with the white balance, picture size and picture quality, as well as opt for monochrome or sepia options if you’re feeling a bit old school.
It’s nice to have the sepia and monochrome options, we suppose, but they do smack of being token options, and almost highlight the limited amount of features the camera offers.
To zoom in and out, you simply roll a finger across the optical trackpad – easy enough, but a mixed blessing.
If you want to take an image using the handset in a landscape position, then you can use the
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