Blackberry Curve 8520 deals & review

The BlackBerry Curve 8520 is a more affordable handset that is part of BlackBerry's cheaper range of phones. It has all of the trappings of a BlackBerry phone although the hardware is not quite as spectacular as what you would find in higher end Bold phones. While it has all of the software features that you would expect from BlackBerry, including Messenger, BlackBerry App World and BlackBerry Maps, as well as a QWERTY keypad the phone is a bit more basic in what it has to offer in terms of hardware. Particularly, the camera is not very impressive with images coming out quite pixelated and low quality.

The Curve 8520 is probably aimed more at the younger section of BlackBerry lovers due to its lower price tag. It has some good entertainment options in the form of games, music and video as well as having BlackBerry Messenger which allows people to keep in touch at a much cheaper rate than through standard SMS messages.

The Curve 8520 has a very similar look and feel to other members of the Curve range, particularly the Curve 8900. While the latter device has a sturdier looking metallic chassis, the Curve 8520 is comprised entirely of black plastic. Although some people decry the use of plastic in smartphones today you would not really expect anything different from a BlackBerry phone, and the Curve 8520 feels sturdy and has a good build quality to it.

In fact, it is probably better in this regards than other Curve phones as it comes with a rubberised covering on its back and sides that will offer it some protection against drops on the floor. For this reason it is probably a good phone to have if you are a bit clumsy; it is less likely to stop functioning with repeated drops than many of the more fragile smartphones on the market.

The battery cover is easy to remove, and is probably one of the easiest to remove battery covers I have encountered. The SIM card is placed behind the battery although it is not so obvious how to insert it. Also inside is a microSD card slot which can hold 32GB cards, and these can be inserted or removed without moving the battery. So it is an easy affair to top up or extend the 256MB internal storage.

The standard buttons around the side of the device are protected by the previously mentioned rubber casing, which can make it a bit difficult to determine what their functions are if you are not already familiar with them. However, the great thing about these buttons is that you can configure them to do what you like. You can use them to load the camera, App World or any number of games and apps.

Also included on the top of the phone, and not found on many other BlackBerry phones, are physical control buttons for music and media. These include a Play/Pause button as well as Next and Previous buttons. These go some way to emphasising the demographic that this phone is aimed at and what its primary purpose is supposed to be. This is a phone aimed at younger BlackBerry users primarily, or users who like using their phone as an entertainment device. These buttons can allow you to quickly control media without having navigate around the phone's interface. This is particularly handy if the phone is in your pocket and you are using it as an mp3 player.

Like a lot of BlackBerry phones the Curve comes with quite a small 2.46 inch screen. This is fine for general interface navigation and is even quite good for videos despite its small size. The screen does have a limited amount of colours available to it with just 65k colour depth on offer. This can cause some things to look like they have been posterized in Photoshop, particularly photos viewed on the phone.

For this reason it was not so easy to tell on first use how good the image quality was for the phone's camera. This camera is just 2 megapixels with basic QVGA video support, which was not particularly amazing even when this phone was released back in 2009. Images captured on the camera can look quite pixelated and low quality, especially when you have used the digital zoom to take a picture.

However, the camera is pretty simple to use and for a lot of people it will serve basic day to day needs. Photos can be transferred to a computer via USB or sent via Bluetooth or email. The phone doesn't really come with many connectivity options other than microUSB and a 3.5mm headphone socket. Bluetooth is available along with Wi-Fi. There is no 3G with this phone, although GPRS and EDGE support are included. Unless you are near a Wi-Fi connection these will be your primary method of using online features and in this day and age most people will find them to be laboriously slow.

The Curve 8520 runs on a 512MHz processor which may sound slow in today's era of dual core beasts, but it provides more than enough power for everything the phone has on offer. The beauty of the BlackBerry operating system is that it is not as inefficient or power hungry as operating systems like Android, so it can survive on much less processing power without any hint of lag.

BlackBerry phones generally have pretty good battery life and this Curve is no exception. The 1150 mAh battery provides a couple of week's standby battery power and several hours talk time. It certainly offers much better performance prospects than many modern smartphones that are completely dead by the end of the day.

The Curve can multitask and you can switch between different tasks via a physical button on the side (after assigning the Application Switcher to one of the convenience keys of course). This makes it pretty easy to switch between tasks, although it doesn't provide a means of closing down an app from this menu.

I must say I am not a big fan of BlackBerry phones. I find the interface to be a bit ugly and the keyboards to be awkward to use with my fat fingers. I have only really had extended use of one BlackBerry phone before, and this was ostensibly a higher end model. I have actually found this cheaper Curve 8520 to be much easier and more enjoyable to use. It is easy to navigate around the interface with the trackpad, and it is a pretty quick affair getting used to using it. In fact, I had got the hang of whizzing around the interface in no time at all even with my limited prior experience of BlackBerry phones.

As this phone comes without 3G it also comes with a pretty archaic WAP browser, for use with GPRS and EDGE. This is fair enough, but as the phone comes with Wi-Fi support as well it would have been nice to enjoy proper HTML browsing. The screen may be a bit small for this though, and with no quick method of zooming (via pinch to zoom on touchscreens for example) it may have made the web browsing less usable.

The browser compresses web data, splits it into chunks and then displays it as needed, supposedly to speed things up. But if you have zoomed in, which you will need to do on virtually every web page, scrolling to other parts of the page causes it to try and load that segment separately. Rather than speeding things up it makes things quite time consuming. The problem is that you get slowed down simply moving around a web page that should already be loaded.

Upon loading up the browser you are provided with an address bar as well as bookmarks and your browsing history. This makes it pretty easy to get back to something you were previously doing or to go to your favourite websites. The browser comes with a cursor (like the one found on a home computer) so that you can easily navigate and select links. Loading of web pages is fairly slow, even when used with Wi-Fi.

Even with the simplified WAP browser the Curve, like most other BlackBerry phones, comes with too small a screen to enjoy web browsing for any extended periods. The browser has a tendency to freeze quite a bit when loading which can disrupt what you are doing. The phone can't use the internet without a SIM card even when connected to a wireless network.

BlackBerry App World gives you access to lots of apps and games to try out on the Curve, ranging from Facebook and Foursquare to Hotel Tycoon and Monopoly. Some of these are free, or can range from about £1-5. The Curve I am using already has some games installed, including Texas Hold'Em and Sudoku. You can also get hold of new themes to personalise the look and feel of your BlackBerry phone. Most of these are free to download and can change the look and feel of the phone quite dramatically.

The App World has apps for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, so you can enjoy these without the need to login through the browser. Confusingly, the email app is just referred to as "messages", although it is pretty easy to use and one of the areas that the phone really benefits from the keyboard. You can attach files to an email which is helpful if you need to send a document to someone – and is an essential requirement for anyone who relies on email for work.

Although the Curve comes with BlackBerry Maps it doesn’t actually include a GPS. Because of this you can use the maps to find your way somewhere, but don't expect it to tell you where you are if you are completely lost.

The Curve comes with a media player where you can listen to music, watch videos, listen to ringtones or look at pictures. Videos are actually quite good despite the smaller screen size and limited colours available. Options are limited and include the ability to repeat videos. The music player is pretty much the same affair, although you are provided with the option of setting a song as a ringtone straight from the menu.

As mentioned, the phone comes with music controls on the top of the handset, so you can quickly pause music or restart a track. You can play music and then switch to do other tasks and the physical buttons will allow you to control the music output while doing other things. The phone also includes a headphone socket so that you can enjoy music without disturbing others. The speakers on the phone can be turned up quite loud, so headphones are not a necessity.

I found typing on the keypad difficult, although I have fat thumbs and I am used to larger onscreen keyboards. The keys are too close together for my liking and it is not my preferred method of entering text onto a phone. This is no different to any other QWERTY phone so if you are comfortable with Blackberry handsets this shouldn't be an issue for you.

I do like the fact that emails and messages will underline misspelt words and you can select them to correct the spelling. The corrections are usually pretty good at predicting what you meant and you are given a choice from a list. It is pretty quick and easy to go through a message and tidy up all the misspellings, certainly easier than on a touchscreen phone. I can't help feeling though that I have made more errors on here than I would have done on a touchscreen phone.

The Curve 8520 is a nice little phone but it is missing some important elements. Professional BlackBerry users might want to look elsewhere as this phone will not be as well suited as many other BlackBerry phones. It would have been nice to have 3G, and even the Wi-Fi could offer better performance. However, this is an entry-level phone and so it is nice to see Wi-Fi included at all.

The camera is pretty disappointing and you may even find yourself not bothering with it after a while, as many shots can turn out quite shoddy. However, having said all of this the phone still has a lot going for it. For one thing, it is one of the cheapest BlackBerry phones on offer and so will be particularly appealing to younger users who only really want access to BlackBerry Messenger.

The phone is pretty easy to navigate around and includes good SMS and email support. Although it has a smaller screen it is also quite good for video playback, and the physical music controls will make this handset ideal for people who find themselves listening to a lot of music on their phones. The phone has limited internal capacity but supports 32GB microSD cards so there is plenty of room for a fair amount of tunes. The rubberised casing on much of the phone will also make it greatly suited to people who might be disposed to being a touch careless with their phones.

The BlackBerry Curve 8520 shares many similarities with other esteemed members of RIM’s range , and is a behemoth when it comes to organisation. An entry-level BlackBerry phone, similar models include the 9300 and Bold 9000, both of which benefit from the Curve’s staple features such as BBM and a slim, simplified design.