Featuring a metallic finish, clean lines and soft edges, the BlackBerry® Curve™ 8310 smartphone is the smallest and lightest BlackBerry® smartphone ever to come with a full QWERTY keyboard.It’s packed with incredible features*, including a camera, media player, built-in GPS, expandable memory, Voice Dialing, BlackBerry® Maps and trackball navigation. Plus, you get all the core functionality you’ve come to expect in a BlackBerry smartphone—email and text messaging, instant messaging, web browser and advanced phone functionality.The BlackBerry Curve—it’s your connection to everything that matters.

Back in May, we fell in love with the original RIM BlackBerry Curve, but a recent refresh of the smartphone has our hearts pitter pattering all over again. The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8310 keeps the same sleek design and robust messaging capabilities of its predecessor, but then adds GPS capabilities. The ability to use your smartphone as a navigation device is particularly useful for mobile professionals who are constantly on the road, running to meetings or traveling for business trips. And we found it to be quite the capable navigator during our road tests using the TeleNav GPS Navigator service. The tradeoff is that for the GPS, you give up integrated Wi-Fi, which is what T-Mobile opted for in the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8320 (we know–we want both, too) and there’s no 3G support yet. For this review, we chose to concentrate on the features and performance of the device; for more details on the phone’s design, please check our review of the original Curve. The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8310 is available now from AT&T for $199.99 with a two-year contract and after rebates, in either red or titanium.

The biggest difference between the original Curve and the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8310 is the addition of GPS. With this feature, you can use Curve as a handheld navigation device with the addition of a location-based service (LBS) or navigation software, such as Google Maps for Mobile. AT&T offers its own LBS called TeleNav GPS Navigator, which includes color maps and text- and voice-guided driving directions, and local search. You can find out more about the add-on service in our full review of TeleNav, and be aware that the service costs $9.99 per month for unlimited trips or $5.99 for up to 10 trips. Check out the Performance section to see how the Curve fared as a navigator.The BlackBerry Curve 8310 handles your phone calls, e-mail, contacts, calendar and tasks with aplomb. An easy to use set-up wizard quickly guides you through setting up business and personal e-mail accounts.

Maps and Points of Interest download over the air when you search for a place or request a route; again this takes some time. For drivers there’s a spoken notification when the route is ready and the app goes straight into turn-by-turn directions. The route overview is a map although you can get a list of turns; again, designed for drivers rather than passengers and zooming into the map means another download to wait for. You get spoken warnings for turns one mile, a quarter of a mile or 500 yards ahead depending on the distance between junctions, but the instructions are just the direction of the turn, not the name of the road. If you’re watching the screen, red bars at the side of the screen count down to the next turn.There’s a 2-megapixel camera on the back for capturing stills, which can be sent swiftly off to an e-mail address or another phone via SMS, accompanied by a reasonably bright LED flash and tiny mirror for self portraits.While the Curve is a quad-band GSM handset, its lack of 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity means you’re stuck with painfully slow speeds for data transfers. Bluetooth is supported for headsets and short-range transfers; the A2DP profile is also included for use with stereo Bluetooth headphones.

Specifications:

Navigation: Trackball, QWERTY (Keyboard), Keyboard backlighting
User Interface: Intuitive icons and menus
Memory: 64 MB flash memory, Expandable memory – support for microSD card
Microprocessor: No
Modem: Embedded RIM® wireless modem, Tethered modem capability

Email Integrations:

• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Microsoft® Exchange
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for IBM® Lotus® Domino®
• Works with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Novell® GroupWise®
• Integrates with an existing enterprise email account
• Integrates with existing personal email account
• Integrates with optional new device account

Device Security:

• Password protection and keyboard lock
• Support for AES or Triple DES encryption when integrated with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server
• FIPS 140-2 Validated (FIPS validation)
• Optional support for S/MIME

Network:

• North America: 850 MHz GSM/GPRS networks
• North America: 1900MHz GSM®/GPRS networks
• Europe/Asia Pacific: 1800MHz GSM/GPRS networks
• Europe/Asia Pacific: 900MHz GSM/GPRS networks
• EDGE networks

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 1:51 am and is filed under Curve series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.