Blackberry 8330 Alltel Phone Review

The sleek and easy to hold design with a simple to use QWERTY keyboard is what makes the BlackBerry Curve 8330 popular. BlackBerry push technology is meant to deliver emails to your phone as they arrive so you read and respond to them. And its applications work together so you can email an internet page to at one of your contacts while you are browsing the net, or listen to music as you read and respond to your emails. Additionally to the push technology reliability, the Curve also offers a 3.5mm headset Jack, microSD Memory Card Slot, Bluetooth connectivity, 2MP Camera, Music Player, support of full web pages, E-Mail and plenty of more. These powerful features round out the overall package that the sleek and elegantly-designed Curve offers.

Blackberry 8330 Alltel Phone | CellularCountry

The Curve 8330 has the same 2.5” landscape LCD with QVGA resolution as the previous Curve models. The LCD looks bright and color saturated. The very useable QWERTY keyboard, the call control buttons, menu buttons and the trackball control remain unchanged also. The same goes for the side buttons and the camera cluster on the back. It’s worth mentioning that the Curve 8330 has a 3.5mm headset jack and comes with a stereo wired headset for your MP3/AAC playback pleasure. The Curve’s microSD card slot is convenient for expanding memory but isn’t convenient to get to. It’s under the battery and you must power down the phone to access it. Have fun with that slow boot up time when you have to access the card frequently.

The GSM Curve models have slightly above average reception and good voice quality, and the CDMA Curves continue that trend. The reception in strong coverage areas is usually 4 bars (out of 5 bars max) and in spotty coverage areas is 1-3 bars.

Like previous Curves, the Curve 8330 has a full HTML browser that works with not only mobile sites but also full HTML sites. Page rendering is good once you turn on all the page layout support options in the browser, but not as good as the Safari-based browser found on the iPhone and Nokia S60 phones (see photo). It has full page view with a cursor to navigate the page and zoom, and has support for Javascript, cookies, cache and more. But it has some trouble loading relatively uncomplicated layouts such as MobileTechReview’s web site where the Curve rendered only 2 columns out of three correctly while the iPhone and the Nokia N95 browsers render the page in true desktop fashion.

The BlackBerry devices have the undisputed advantage in push email and corporate backend email integration. The BlackBerry Curve offers all that push email goodness: email set up is easy, sending and receiving email is very fast and has support for a wide variety of attachment formats. In almost all aspects the BlackBerry devices are still the kings of email except in one area: rendering HTML email. While the iPhone, some Nokia smartphones and Window Mobile smartphones with Exchange support can display emails in HTML format, the BlackBerry Curve 8330 only shows unsightly links and broken pages when displaying emails with HTML without third party software like BBSmart or Empower solutions.

The BlackBerry Curve can also record video with audio, a feature that’s so far enjoyed by BlackBerry Pearl users. You can take video clips in 240 x 176 and 176 x 144 resolutions, but oddly can only save them to a storage card not the phone’s internal memory. The videos look reasonably good, and the LED flash can illuminate subjects within an arm’s length well.

CDMA users who admired the BlackBerry Curve from a distance can now get their hands on this messaging smartphone sprinkled with a touch of multimedia. Despite the complicated backend server support for everything under the sun (Lotus Domino, MS Exchange, Novel GroupWise, etc.), the email is extremely easy to set up and use for a regular Joe. The web browser, though not top notch, gets the job done, especially if you turn on all the options for tables and etc.