List Price:$499.00 Our Price:$349.00 Your Save: $ 150.00 ( 30% ) Availability: N/A Manufacturer:BlackBerry
Average Customer Rating:
Binding: Electronics Brand: BlackBerry Color: Titanium EAN: 0843163014640 Feature: Bluetooth® headset, hands-free and serial port profiles supported Is Autographed: 0 Is Memorabilia: 0 Label: BlackBerry Manufacturer: BlackBerry Model: Curve 8300 Modem Description: Wireless cellular modem Publisher: BlackBerry Studio: BlackBerry
Features
Bluetooth® headset, hands-free and serial port profiles supported Full QWERTY keyboard Dynamic, highly responsive experience when viewing attachments and graphics, browsing the web and running applications Next-generation media player with audio and video playback in a variety of formats 2 megapixel camera with built-in flash
Featuring clean lines and soft edges, the BlackBerry Curve 8300 smartphone is the smallest and lightest BlackBerry smartphone ever to come with a full QWERTY keyboard.It?s packed with incredible features, including a camera, BlackBerry Maps, a media player, expandable memory, Voice-activated Dialing, tethered modem and trackball navigation. Plus you get all the core functionality you?ve come to expect in a BlackBerry smartphone - email and text messaging, instant messaging, web browser and advanced phone functionality.The BlackBerry Curve - it?s your connection to everything that matters.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: I love this little gadget - it rocks! I am an iPhone Convert Comment: After being a first Gen iPhone owner for the past year and being totally unimpressed with the lack of push email and the phone quality, it was time to look into something that would fit me in a practical way by serving my business and personal needs. I found it with the Blackberry Curve.
I bought mine off of the AT&T site as a refurb. The unit(s) (we got two of them to replace our iPhones) were in stellar condition and I would never have known they were reconditioned. Instead of paying the $399 price tag, we paid $89 and got two beautiful red Blackberries. They are gorgeous and a lot of fun too.
With the Curve you will find both beauty and function. I added SanDisk 8GB MicroSD cards to our phones and have had some level of difficulty with one of them when syncing with a MacBook Pro (using PocketMac). During one Sync all of my music was lost and the card was "unformatted". I am not sure how this happened but after some forum searches I found that I could reformat them on my PC and again load my music onto it. A problem might arise if you are a Mac user and do not have access to a PC. This might have been an anomaly ... but I did find others on the Internet who had had the same problem and were searching for solutions. As of now, the card is working ok and I am not stuck with the notion of having to send it back for a replacement like so many others have.
Regarding the Blackberry Curve -- we have one set up on a PC and one set up on my MacBook Pro. The PC user definitely wins out in this battle as the desktop software included really is superior to PocketMac which is Blackberry's answer for Mac users. There is also another piece of software called Missing Sync which should be researched if you are a Curve and Mac user.
I love this phone -- and speaking of phone -- the phone quality is excellent and I'm already using up some of the 2400 rollover minutes that were left over from my iPhone plan. Regarding phone quality between the first gen iPhone's and the Blackberry Curve. There is no comparison. The BB Curve makes the iPhone seem like a toy and they definitely seem targeted to two different audiences. If mail/phone are your priority -- this is the phone for you! Customer Rating: Summary: Phone I have been waiting for Comment: The Blackberry Curve 8310 is the phone I have wanted for a long time. There have been many that have pretended to be as useful as this phone, and I have bought those phones over they years.
My favorite feature is the GPS used with downloadable (free) Google Maps. This feature was tantalizingly close to be realized on my previous phone (Blackberry 7520).
A few observations from the first week of use:
GPS/Google Maps is very useful feature, though Google is free but it does not come with the phone.
The sound quality is better than any other phone I have had.
The expandable microSD card slot allows the upload of music, enough for me at least. Don't plan on bringing your entire collection though.
The graphic quality is outstanding.
Typical Blackberry usability is up to their usual standard.
On the down side:
The keys are a little small for my fingers, but it does have a QWERTY keyboard on a relatively small phone...to be expected. Customer Rating: Summary: Blackberry makes all other smartphones look dumb Comment: I've just received my unlocked Blackberry Curve and I can only say Amazing! It has all the features I was looking for:
- QWERTY keyboard
- MP3 player
- 2 MP Camera
- Tasks
- Notes
- MP3 ringtone capability
Plus the other great features like email, web access and it is fully customizable.
The only reason I give it a 4 star rating is because it can't take video. Otherwise, it is beyond my expectations:
- Camera is better than expected
- Reception is far better than the Samsung X660 I had between the Blackberry and my now defunct Treo 650.
- Trackball is very, very useful. Altough I miss the touchscreen of the Treo,this trackball is almost as versatile.
- Speakerphone is very clear, I can hear really well and the other person listens to me without complications.
So far, the best phone I had. Customer Rating: Summary: Not for the new users of Blackberry Comment: Set the scene and then I can base the critism on my user profile. Note, this review is about the phone and not the service.
I get 200-250 e-mails a day and in 4-8 meetings a day. I am 35 years old. I spend 10-12 hrs a working day around a computer. I just used a small laptop for my organiser and e-mail. I have never used a PDA. Blackberry seems an obvious choice to make me more productive?
Why did I buy?
-Many people around me had PDAs either iPhone or Blackberry. I felt I was being left behind.
-Computing magazine review rated this phone the highest for e-mail
-I wanted easier access to my Outlook calendar and e-mail
-It's cool for my friends to see me with one?!
What's good about it?
It was easy to link to my Outlook exchange server and get e-mails. But the goodness stops there. It may be easy to put gas/petrol in the car but if the car is slow, incredibly difficult to steer and drive, what's the point of having easy filling?
What's bad?
-It crashes once a day.
-The keys are so rediculously small that writing text fast will not happen. You hit multiple and wrong keys. You often need the delete key and it is burried at the bottom under your thumb. Someone needs to think about usability!
-Usability is appauling!!! I expect to invest some time in learning new technology but the whole thing has been designed without a primary audience. I want a Blackberry to phone, see my calendar and read and answer short e-mails. I have an iPod for music.
You start the device and you have by default 20+ icons. I want 3!!! The first thing you need to work out is how to get rid of the usless items to make it quick to navigate to your primary use cases. (Blackberry, give me a set up wizard!)
When you want to dial a number you have to use the 9 '2' font keys on the screen. Doing this with one hand is painful. The numbers are also on the left hand side. Most of use will use our right thumb!
Then to chnage any settings most items are burried in very un-intuitive text on a 'left click' button. Further more, what you are after is often burried deep in the navigation. Read on for an example...
-The Noises!!!! The defaults drove me crazy!! 200 e-mails a day. I could have danced to the music the phone made. Every e-mail, every calendar invite the things buzzed beeped and chirped! It was killing the battery. I just needed to know if a phone call was coming in. The fun part was then turning the bleeps off! Read on for an example of crazy usability.
-Turning off beeps
I write this as an example of how bad it gets in places to do simple tasks
It took me about 15 minutes to find out how to do an obvious function.
1) Navigate to item 15 using the roller ball
2) Click using the roller- ball. This opens the drop down menu with 4 big items, normal, vibrate, Quiet and Loud. You would think you then use that 'left click' button to edit. Wrong.
3) Carefull observe there is a tiny indicator that you can scroll beyond these basic options- not obvious. Select at the very bottom 'Advanced' option. Click using the roller ball
4)Observe a new list of profiles which you just saw in just a smaller menu this time!!!
5)Navigate to the profil you wish to edit- say 'Loud'. Now click with the roller ball.
6)If you didn't realise, the 12 different items on this screen from 'Browser' to 'Tasks' are all individual functions on the balckberry with their annoying beep associations. Get this, you need to edit each one to set your desired noise. Here's how
7) Select the functionality you wish to change the noise on, say 'Messenger- New Message'. Who named it 'messenger'!!!
8) You now have a dialogue with 11 options per beep function!!! Change volumne, tune, number of beeps, LED, vibrartions and number etc
9) Click 'Out of Holster' using the roller ball, None, vibrate, Tone or vibrate plus tone.
10) Select an option by clicking with the roller ball.
11) Change any of the other 11 options per function by going to step 9)
12) Use the navigate back button to force a save. Save dialogue then pops up.
13) Select the save or discard button using roller ball.
14) Now go back to step 7 and repeat to 14 another 11 times for the other default beep and tune settings for the default 'Loud' profile!!!
...another 15 minutes later...
-The e-mail text you get back has lost all formatting so often you loose context and it is impossible to read.
-The synchronization software using default installs on XP was slowing my machine start-up by 2 minutes, locking all access to the machine! It was the first thing I uninstalled.
- I can go on but hopefully you guys get the drift and won't make the same mistake as me
Final conclusion
For new users I would wait until a decent user interface comes along that hooks up with Outlook and addresses primary needs. Also a user interface that tries to do core jobs well and not everything from navigating the internet on a 2 inch screen, playing games, GPS, music and so on. For BlackBerry, they need to clean up their usability, software performance and stability. If iPhone get easy sychronisation and backup with Outlook and Lotus Notes, Blackberry will die as soon as their contracts expire. Customer Rating: Summary: Great buy great phone Comment: I love it what more can I say had it six months now and still love it plus the $58.00 price was the best.
