We found it hard to get excited over that other recent QWERTY-less BlackBerry , but we’ve swallowed a lungful of unpolluted air and approached this new 3.2-inch, 800MHz Curve 9380 with an open mind. It is the first touch-only device within the entry-level Curve family and it deserves to be considered by itself merits. So, in case you are available in the market for a comparatively cheap smartphone that hooks up seamlessly to RIM’s persistently popular ecosystem, and which puts BlackBerry Messenger and BBM Music at your fingertips (in preference to your thumbs), then please read on for our hands-on video and impressions.
Physically, the 9380 is a Curve device through and during. Despite the absence of a keypad, it looks and feels extremely equivalent to the 0 9360 0 — and when viewed from the back it’s identical. It’s no bad thing, however, because these are well-built devices. One regret is that the that the glossy finish at the back and front smears easily, which does not happen with matte-finished higher-end BlackBerries just like the 1 Bold 9790 1 , which was also announced today.
Unfortunately, the 9380 has also inherited the 9360′s 480 x 360 screen resolution, which ends up in a low pixel density at the 3.2-inch LCD. This is not much of an issue during general use, but you actually notice it when browsing.
The device is thin and intensely pocketable — we do not have official measurements at hand, but we gauged the thickness to be around 10mm. As with most hardy BBs, there is no particular urge to feature to its girth by encasing it in a protective sleeve.
There are four back-lit buttons along the base — Call, Options, Back, Hang-up/Power — along with the optical trackpad inside the center. These four buttons appear to be they may be capacitive, but they’re push buttons. That’s largely a question of non-public preference, but we will not help but notice that even less expensive handsets just like the 2 Huawei Ideos X3 2 can deliver capacitive navigation buttons that usually give a smoother experience.
There is a dedicated camera button positioned beneath the quantity rocker, that is a major help. However, we found all of the buttons along this right side of the telephone to be thin, stiff and unsatisfying to press. The camera itself is 5MP and functional. It isn’t a patch on high-end smartphones, but it’s fast and the brilliant LED flash makes it good at what it’s intended for: social snaps for speedy viewing and sharing.
Charging is finished via the micro-USB port, that’s the one feature at the left side of the telephone. At the top edge we’ve the three.5mm jack exactly where you’d look forward to finding it, and the basic lock button. At the rear side on the bottom you discover a shockingly powerful speaker, which delivers good bass when laid on a flat surface. Beneath the fiddly cover you discover a microSD slot for as much as 32GB of expanded storage and a SIM slot buried beneath a fair more nail-bending 1230mAh battery. Onboard application storage is poor — our fresh handset had just 120MB free.
The 800MHz processor boots the telephone in only over a minute and seems to do a very good job of running OS 7. However, this usual fluidity doesn’t extend to the browser, which was slow and sometimes erratic at rendering detailed web sites.
0 Overall, the worthiness of this phone is dependent upon how much you’re into the BlackBerry ecosystem, how much you like a touchscreen over a physical keyboard and — most significantly — how much you’re willing to spend. RIM leaves pricing as much as its carriers, but this device must be seriously cheap if it’s to make an impact when it hits the market in some weeks, because 3 budget Androids 3 have become better on a regular basis.
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