RIM BlackBerry Curve 9380 Review

Introduction:

The BlackBerry Curve 9380 marks somewhat of a milestone for RIM, as it is the company’s first device of the supposedly affordable Curve series that comes in a touchscreen-only form. It disposes of the legendary physical keyboard, as found on its 9370 cousin, replacing it with a fairly tiny 3.2” display. In comparison, the BlackBerry Torch 9860 is touchscreen-only as well, but has a more generous 3.7-incher with better resolution.

The rest of the specs on the Curve 9380, like the 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 5MP fixed-focus camera with LED flash are nothing to get too excited over, but with RIM it’s supposedly the software that counts. So did the Canadians manage to usher the entry level Curve series in the touchscreen era, while at the same time preserving the BlackBerry spirit with the Curve 9380? Read on to find out…

In the box:

• Wall charger
• In-ear headphones
• 2GB microSD card
• MicroUSB cable
• Warranty and information leaflets

Design:

Thanks to the modest 3.2” display the BlackBerry Curve 9380 is a very compact and lightweight device that cups well in the palm, while the tapered back and rounded sides add to the comfortable feeling in the hand. Your thumb reaches everywhere on the display, making one-handed operation a piece of cake.



You can compare the RIM BlackBerry Curve 9380 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The Curve 9830 is all-plastic, but the choice of materials and the build quality are pretty good. We liked the way that the three-toned back blends things in, like on the 9370 or the 9860. We go from a large piano black glossy plastic for the battery cover to matte plastic on the rim where the 5MP camera with LED flash and the speaker grill are, to the faux-metal rim surrounding the sides.

What we didn’t like, though, are the side keys, copied directly from the Torch 9860. The five physical keys below the display are well-lit in white, and pretty tactile, but for the volume and camera buttons on the right the designers decided not to interrupt the matte plastic rim that runs along. Instead, they just bumped it in the areas where the contacts for the volume buttons, and the camera key are. Those “bumps” are not protruding enough to be easily found and pushed, plus you have to apply a very significant pressure for the contacts to register anything, especially on the volume keys and the tiny mute button between them, which are incredibly stiff and edgy to boot.

As if to soothe your pains here, RIM has added its cool padlock sign at the top of the phone, indicating where you have to touch to unlock the screen – pretty neat idea that differs from the pack. Don’t get us wrong – it’s not a capacitive key, you still have to gently push down until the contacts meet, but it is flush with the top surface, and only indicated by a little padlock sign. Joy.

The only thing on the left is the microUSB port for charging and syncing, and the only other opening around the phone is the standard audio jack up top.


Display:

The LCD screen is very bright, which helps a lot when viewing outdoors, and its colors look vivid. The viewing angles could be better, brightness and color deterioration start to show up after the 45 degree mark, which is typical for this type of LCD technology. A 360x480 pixels resolution makes for 188ppi pixel density, which is bearable.

Interface and Functionality:

RIM’s BlackBerry OS 7.0 is pretty intuitive to master, and doesn’t have a steep learning curve, not only if you come from the previous OS editions, but also if you come from Android or iOS. Not that you would if you are not specifically in need of the BlackBerry services, but we digress.


The dialer has nice huge buttons to key in those phone numbers, and the contacts list doesn’t seem changed in layout compared to the previous OS versions. It lists contacts alphabetically by a criteria of your choosing, and also has smart search, so finding who you want to call is pretty easy by just keying in the first few letters until they get filtered down. You'd better master the smart dialing, as the contact fields are fairly thick to make them more touch-friendly and only a few fit on one screen, and you'll be incessantly scrolling otherwise.

There are two notification and connectivity bars at the top of the homescreen. The one strictly for notifications has profiles and search buttons on its sides. You don’t pull the bars down, like with Android, iOS, Nokia Belle or bada OS, but just tap on the thicker bar instead, for example, and it falls down, revealing plethora of connectivity switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data and so on, even an NFC toggle.

We liked this solution as you don’t have to hold your finger and drag a bar from the top to bottom, that’s how lazy we are. We also liked that there is a quick access to your alarm setup from the functions bar, as well as to the general settings menu. If you want the bars to roll back up, just tap them again.

The real kicker – these bars are only present on the home screen, and are not accessible from within apps, which kind of defeats the purpose. To reach the goodies inside them, you have to switch back to the home screen, but, hey, you find out there is multitasking in the process. We kid, it’s annoying.

You’ll be swiping in vain left or right to switch home screens if you come from all others but Windows Phone. BlackBerry OS features a pull-up drawer at the bottom instead, and then you can swipe left and right through grids of apps, categorized as All, Favorites, Downloads, Media and Frequent on different pages. If a rich category, like All, for example, has too much app icons to fit on one page, you can just scroll up and down the menu page itself, revealing the rest of the apps in the category. Very often, however, instead of scrolling we fired up an application as the touchscreen was too quick to register our finger as a single tap on an app icon.


The iconography is quite stellar and done with attention to detail, the menu backgrounds are transparent, and about the only thing missing to complete the pretty interface is transitional animations. RIM might have decided to ditch those as the Curve sports just an 800MHz Qualcomm chipset and 512MB of RAM/ROM. This hardware, however, is enough to power BB OS 7.0, and we rarely experienced lag or hiccups, while working with the UI, plus the screen rotation felt almost instant as well. In fact, the interface is conceived with a full-fledged landscape mode, and turns immediately when you tilt the phone.

Still, a 3.2-incher is not the best way to go if you rely only on the display for typing, no matter how good the on-screen keyboard is. The one on the BlackBerry Curve 9380 is with well-spaced blueish buttons, a one-tap way to change the keyboard language, or access a numpad and symbols layout, but small is small. Moreover, the handset sometimes fails to catch up with the speed we are typing, which isn't fast by any means, showing the letters on the screen with delay.


As far as RIM’s software services, you will find the industry stalwarts like BBM and the BlackBerry Email setup on the Curve 9380. Granted, there are similarly good messaging and email solutions for the top mobile operating systems now, but RIM is still up to snuff when it comes to enterprise security, so government workers and the corporate crowd who are on BlackBerry servers might dig the Curve 9380, despite that it seems meant mostly as a consumer device rather than a workhorse.


It offers some business perks like an office documents editor, but yet again we come to the smallish display as a big deterrent. Moreover, to take advantage of those renowned BlackBerry services you really need a BIS account for emailing the way RIM intended it. If you don’t have one, you are doomed to use the webmail versions, even with popular services like Gmail.

Browser and Connectivity:

There is no Adobe Flash rendering in the browser on the Curve 9380, so you will only be enjoying Flash-based ads thanks to Flash Lite - we know you want it. A RIM exec commented on the lack of Flash support that "You need dual-core processors to render Flash in the way that we would want to do it. The processing power isn't there yet." RIM's also not there yet with dual-core phones, so you have to learn how to be happy without Flash.


The browser is also not a speed king, with checkered boxes appearing often when you scroll quickly through the page, or zoom in by pinching in fervor. The optical trackpad in the home key does help to find and click on very tiny objects on a website with a mouse pointer, but it’s more of a gimmick than something you’d regularly use.

The BlackBerry Curve 9380 sports quad-band GSM support and tri-band 14.4Mbps HSDPA, with frequencies depending on the region it is sold at, as well as the usual Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. It can also have NFC, depending on the carrier, but there is no FM Radio, if that’s a dealbreaker for you.

Camera:

The camera interface is pretty simple yet functional, with most options like the flash and scene modes situated at the dock on the bottom with large fat buttons making them easy to toggle. The 5MP camera with LED flash doesn't capture enough detail, there is copious amount of noise, and the pictures turned out soft, maybe because of the fixed-focus camera, meaning that you can forget about close-up shots as well. The colors and contrast, however, are representing well the original scene, so the pics are good for occasional Facebook sharing. Indoor shots came out very noisy, while the flash did a poor job of illuminating the scene from about 5 feet distance.

The Curve 9380 records VGA video at 30fps, unlike its more expensive brethren with 1GHz CPUs which do 720p now. The video is nothing to write home about in terms of definition, and in our case it did 25fps on average, but detail is fine, with the contrast and colors of the actual environment accurately represented.

RIM BlackBerry Curve 9380 Sample Video:



To enter camera mode, you have to press the BlackBerry key, which serves as context menu button, and choose “Video camera” from the crowded settings list.  For some strange reason you also can't start and stop the video capture with the camera key, because you will instantly switch to pictures mode, but have to use the on-screen button instead, or the home key, if your hands are in gloves.

Multimedia:

The music player on the Curve 9380 is pretty functional and looking good in the meantime – your songs are categorized by artists, albums and playlists, plus album art and captions can be displayed, if available. You can’t just tap on the progress bar to advance or rewind within a song, you have to move a slider, which is quite tiny to grip, especially for larger fingers. The loudspeaker volume is decent, but the sound is a bit flat and tinny. On the other hand, the music player supports the lossless FLAC format, which is a pretty good feature to have.

The handset supports not only the usual MPEG-4 video files, but also DivX right out of the box, which is a good thing since the 14500-strong application store is not that rich in decent video players offered for free. Xvid support is hit-or-miss, some did play, some didn't. Other than some Xvid files, we found the Curve 9380 to play videos up to 720p with no issues.

Performance:

Voice quality in the earpiece was good, as we are accustomed to with BlackBerry handsets. We could hear the voices loud and clear, while on the other side they also confirmed that what we say comes out clean, and with strong volume.
 
The 1230mAh battery might seem with a relatively small capacity for today’s standards, and indeed, the Curve 9380 is quoted for the below average 5 hours and 40 minutes of talk time in 3G mode.

Conclusion:

The BlackBerry Curve 9380 is an interesting foray in the touchscreen-only jungle by RIM, which probably meant to create a decent consumer-oriented budget device with its services staples. Yet when you get rid of one huge advantage for BlackBerry aficionados, which is the physical keyboard, and replace it with an on-screen one plastered over a wimpy 3.2-incher, eyebrows are bound to be raised.

There is just no way that the suit and government types will be typing on the Curve 9380 like on the markedly easier BlackBerry physical portrait keyboards, which are RIM’s trademark for the world. RIM might be shooting itself in the foot here, as it doesn’t have many competitive advantages over the more popular Android and iOS now, just the wonders of BBM, BIS and the legendary BlackBerry security, coupled with the excellent keyboards, and one of those advantages is missing on the Curve 9380, because the screen size is so small.

Average users, on the other hand, have so much choice in the segment the Curve 9380 is striving for, that grabbing precisely this handset out of the pile seems a bit of an utopian hope for RIM, if it meant the 9380 as a consumer-oriented device. They’ll see a handset with stiff side keys, entry level screen, processor and video capture. Yet they’ll be asked to pay the “BlackBerry premium”, which will likely steer them away from the Curve 9380.

For its price you can get phones like the Sony Ericsson Xperia ray, a much more capable munchkin with a way better camera, screen resolution and Android applications galore. If you are into typing lengthy emails, you can grab the HTC Desire Z for even less money, with its excellent physical keyboard and crafty design. If you are longing for that legendary portrait keyboard, the oldie BlackBerry Bold 9780 has it for only a tad more.

In case you want something markedly different, like Windows Phone, you can check out the Samsung Omnia W for the same money, with a 4” Super AMOLED display and good Microsoft Exchange email support.

Yet if you absolutely must have the BlackBerry services in a trendy touchscreen-only device, the Curve 9380 is indeed a budget way to do it, provided that you don’t plan on a lot of typing. If you do, you'd better splurge a bit extra, and get the Torch 9860, which offers the same experience, but on a more bearable 3.7” display, plus you get faster processor and 720p video recording.

Software version of the reviewed unit:  7.0.0.482

RIM BlackBerry Curve 9380 Video Review: