RIM BlackBerry Curve Review

Interface:

The Curve has a very similar interface to other BlackBerries. There are 21 icons in a 5 x 4 style grid style layout on the default profile. AT&T’s default theme is looks very cartoonish and completely ruins the great screen. Luckily, there are other themes that you can change to loaded with the phone or if those don’t work for you, you can download one from AT&T.

At the top, there is a banner that holds the time, date, etc. in the top left hand corner are the time and date. The signal indicator and battery life indicator are on the right hand side. To the left of the signal indicator, there is an indicator that will inform you if you’re on an EDGE or GRPS network. In the center is the AT&T logo and name and the Cingular name is just below it.

All the icons can be moved around to organize them to your liking. To organize them further, custom folders can be made to separate the types of shortcuts.



Phonebook:

The phonebook on the Curve is the standard BlackBerry phonebook. Email addresses and phonebook contacts are combined into one entry so that there is less confusion. There are plenty of fields to enter so that all of the necessary information can be added to the entry (first and last name, title, picture, email, company job title, address, email address, work/home/mobile/pager/fax numbers, web page, category, usernames, and notes.)

Folders can be created to organize users but the purpose is defeated since the username stays in the address book as well as the folder that was created.


Organizer:

The calendar with the Curve is standard but still very informative. Views can be seen in a day/week/month/agenda view. The default view is set to day but it can be changed through the menu. Free time is set to be included by default in the agenda. This just adds to the list and makes it more complicated than it should be. Luckily, this can be turned off.


Adding an appointment is done by going through the menu. The fields are: subject, location, description, if it’s an all day event, start/end time and date, duration, time zone, shown as (free/busy/tentative/out of office), reminder (none/0/5/10/15/30/45 minutes/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12 hours/1/2/3/4/5/6 days/1 week), recurrence (none/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly), mark as private, and notes. For those who travel often, you can set the appointments to different time zones to create less confusion for yourself.

Other standard features are calculator, alarm, task pad, and memo pad. The calculator is a standard calculator and there are no scientific functions available. There is only one alarm that can be set and the available options are: Alarm on/off, time, snooze on/off, alert type (tone, vibrate, vibrate + tone), tune, volume (escalating/high/medium/low), and number of beeps (1/2/3).

The memo pad sounds exactly like what it does, it just stores little notes that you want to have at hand. The task pad is much more useful and almost feels like a second calendar. You can enter task name, status (not started/in progress/completed/waiting/deferred), priority (high/normal/low), due (none/by date), time zone, reminder (none/by date), categories, and notes.

Voice commands are included with the Curve but performance is less than stellar. Using the voice command to call someone worked out well but other commands did not seem to work quite often. Either the command would not be recognized or the wrong program was opened. Searching manually comes out much faster in the end.