Spotlight Customer Reviews
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Real Estate Must Have!
Comment: This phone was the answer to almost all of my needs! Being in the Real Estate Industry, I rely on always being available.....and when I cannot be available I must still be in contact with the working world. This phone lets me keep up on employees and others I work with while I am out. Responding to clients needs is very simple and they appreciate me being able to get a hold of them and to respond to requests in minutes! Taking a few hours off to golf and not feeling guilty! I am literally still in the office with full access to all of my documents, contacts, tasks, calendars and more!
The camera on this is great. Not close to a Nikon and definitely would not use for property photos for advertising, but driving by a smoking deal and being able to send the mls info and some "decent" quality pictures to a client to get the "OK" is priceless.
For those whom have primarily EMAIL needs, do not even try others. Blackberry has nailed it as they always have. I have been through countless Blackjacks, Dash's, Wizards, Pocket Pc's, Treo's and others and no one can compare to Blackberry's instant email push. Don't hesitate; the only decision is what blackberry you want.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: defective software
Comment: I bought the blackberry in December 2007. Within a month, there were problems with memory, recalling numbers, keypad etc.
In March, I spent much time with T-Mobile technical support to fix these issues. They suggested I needed a memory card even though I was emailing very little and was not downloading applications, data ... I have been erasing all calls, texts etc every day since. The problems have continued.
It is now June 1, 2008, I am demanding that T-Mobile replace an obvious defective handset and I am being met with resistance. They want me to buy a memory card and I am refusing. ( Two other family members have this same Curve and use it to collect data much more than I do and have had not issues)
I would suggest to all buyuers to go with another carrier to avoid the problems I am having.
Customer Rating: Summary: Blackberry Curve 8320 T-Mobile - Loving it..... still!!!!!,
Comment: This is by far the coolest phone I've had! I love the ease of set up - I have yet to even glance at the manual. Before I knew it, I was surfing the internet and dowloading Google Maps (a must have for every blackberry user - the satellite views are amazing)! Camera is the best I've seen on any cellphone thus far. With a memory card you could load up to 2GB (unsure if a larger card will work) of music, ringtones, videos, and pictures. The screen is beautiful! Very impressive Blackberry.
The only negative aspect that I could find, was the fact that T-Mobile's version does not have GPS (AT&T does). But this flaw can easily be overcome by buying an optional portable GPS receiver that costs anywhere from $45 - 100 bucks.
Overall - this is one awesome phone!
Customer Rating: Summary: Powerful,Great Quality/Design,not easy to configure
Comment: (Note: long review)
I was shopping for a phone (not a PDA) when I decided to buy the Blackberry Curve 8320. My top priorities were:
* to eliminate my need for an office landline by using an inexpensive cell phone plan and a phone with maximum coverage options
* great call quality
* ease of use and configuration
* good headset features that would allow me to easily talk while using my computer
Less important but desirable were:
* Bluetooth so I could occasionally use my Garmin Nuvi 660 for hands free phone use and POI dialing.
* a media player (but not if it got in the way of phone use)
The service provider was more important than the phone, and that led me to T-mobile, which offers good coverage in my area, the best prices, great service, and Hotspot@home which increases coverage to anywhere with open WiFi.
So my perspective is that of a solo consultant who chose a Blackberry Curve over other, less complex, T-mobile Hotspot@home compatible phones (the other choices were Nokia 6086, Samsung Katalyst, and Samsung t409).
Pros:
Call quality when using included headset (and T-mobile network) is the best I've ever experienced with any kind of phone, cell or otherwise.
3.5mm jack means many options for headsets of any type/quality/price.
Very stable: The PDA and media functions don't crash the phone or get in the way of phone use. So this model works for those who want a phone first and foremost without any compromises (though there are a couple minor quirks mentioned below).
Having WiFi as an option is great, though I don't need it at home or at my office thanks to good T-mobile reception. I want this option not in order access the web or to save money (1000 minutes per month is plenty for me), but rather to increase call quality in situations where the network signal is weak or not present.
Has many physical design features that are very well thought out: user assignable buttons, a surprisingly usable keyboard despite the tiny size, a standby mode button (prevents accidental key presses) - all in an attractive yet solid form factor - and there are many accessories available to augment use of the phone. The more I use it, the more impressed I am with the physical design.
Volume control is superb - can go up loud enough to be able to use in very noisy conditions - and if there is a risk of ear damage from excessive volume, a warning pops up.
Even if you never send emails from the phone, having a well designed keyboard makes for a better phone: It makes dialing contacts fast, means 26 speed dial keys (letters are easier to remember than numbers), and typing in a new contact is faster than with numeric keypad phones.
The address book is very nicely integrated with the phone in a way that makes it fast and easy to dial contacts even if they are not on speed dial - just dial the first couple letters of anyone's first or last name and you'll then be able to use track ball to pick out the contact. It was easy to install and use the software on my computer that enabled me to transfer my 150 contacts from MS Outlook.
The "Send Voice Note" feature lets me send myself (or anyone) a voice note, usually in less than 10 seconds. Never imagined wanting such a feature but now that I have it I love to use it to send myself reminders or cash expense notes for later entry into Quicken.
Battery life is good if used primarily as a phone.
In March, 2008, the phone cost only fifty (after rebate) when purchased with a 2 year contract commitment through Amazon. This was relevant as the other phone I considered was the Nokia 6086 - which would have been free through the same source. Purchased direct from T-mobile the 8320 costs two hundred additional which was a big enough difference that I didn't even consider the 8320 at first. Even though I wasn't shopping for a PDA, the modest extra cost was well worth it for a couple of nonPDA features - and I get to see for a modest cost if using as a PDA makes sense for me.
T-mobile's pricing plans are the least expensive available for national service plans - the 39.99/month for 1000 anytime minutes and unlimited weekends/nights is just what I need. For another 9.99/month I got BB E-mail, as required by the Amazon offer. The additional cost of 15 cents per MMS message is fine if you send just a few MMS each month like me.
T-mobile's customer service is the best I've ever experienced from a phone company.
Blackberries are popular so that means lots of options for support and Accessories, and integration with other systems. For example, users of Gmail and Google Apps will like that Google has already provided some integration tools and integration is likely to greatly improve by the end of the year.
Cons:
Complexity of interface and scattered options/help screens leads to many hours of figuring out how to configure the phone - or finding out something can't be done. Discovering some of the answers required use of online forums or calls to T-mobile.
The default settings were a bit different from typical cell phone settings. It is time consuming and tedious to configure the 8320 to act like a normal cell phone (though you can do it in less than half an hour with a new phone once you finish learning where all the settings are). I wish I had discovered sooner that the majority of changes a basic user would want to make are buried in two applications if you study them carefully:
Profiles/Advanced/Normal/Phone and Options/Screen/Keyboard.
Some things that are standard on most phones cannot be done (or in some cases additional effort is required to download/install an application).
Examples of missing standard phone functions are:
1) cannot ring/vibrate simultaneously
2) no sustained flashing LED when there's a voice mail (it does for a few minutes but then it stops - so if you happen to miss a call and not be near your phone for the next 15 minutes, you won't know you got a call unless you look at the screen).
When not using the headset, your ear must be in the proper place for good quality. If your natural inclination is to place your ear close to the phone and just above it, you'll hear a low level hiss from the speaker (true with both phone or media player use). This is minor if you learn to hold the phone differently and/or primarily use with headset.
A little uncomfortable to hold this wide phone for calls of more than a few Minutes. Avoid this phone if you have small hands and/or plan to spend many hours per week using as a phone without headset.
Too little memory (or is it bad memory management?). I am not (nor do I want to become) a power user but yet will need to do a battery pull every few weeks (Update: there is a way to do a soft reboot. Alt-Right Shift-Delete). It starts with around 21MB free but just checking out the various applications and settings and using the media player without even enabling email dropped it to 16MB. A battery pull bumped it back up to 21MB. With memory so cheap it seems bizarre that it comes with so little.
Having expandable SD memory is great but the Curve is very slow and sometimes awkward in how it accesses the SD memory. For example, for music albums with many short tracks, it can take over 30 seconds to open the album and begin to play music when loaded first time. It is also slow to display the names of albums from the SD card after each time the phone connects to a computer.
Having WiFi accessibility is great but in many cases requires changes to the router configuration. Would rather this worked with any open router without having to reconfigure - or if reconfiguration is required, then make it easy to do. On the bright side, T-mobile offers pre-configured routers for $50 for those who don't want to go through the reconfiguration hassle. Would like it even better if they sold a portable gadget that simply took any open WiFi signal and converted it into a format that works fine with my phone.
Having Bluetooth compatibility with my Garmin 660 is nice but if not for a terrific post on the blackberryforums.com web site by ggraves, I'm not sure I ever would have been able to get it working properly. Garmin tech support did not know what needed to be done to get the 660 working with the Blackberry Curve. Connecting properly should not be so complicated or required making a change to the Garmin operating system.
It's a finger controlled PDA. It is time consuming to figure out how to work all the functions of the device and this can be a distraction from getting work done. This has happened to me, as I am one of those people who gets sucked into checking out the capabilities of a new electronic gadget.
I owned one of the first Palm-based PDA cell phones and experienced the same thing - I wasted more time trying to figure things out then I saved by being able to browse or have my contacts on a phone instead of on a printout (and struggled to learn the custom alphabet). I turned away from PDA phones after that experience and figured I'd wait until intelligent voice interfaces were standard for these things but here I am wasting time again.
I'll gladly ditch this phone the year an affordable, intelligent, voice controlled cell phone comes out.
The process for buying this phone through Amazon was unwieldy - was not able to get hotspot@home for Amazon and am not able to add it for 6 months without incurring a penalty (so says an Amazon rep - T-mobile reps say you can add hotspot@home without penalty but I don't want it enough to risk a $250 penalty). When I checked the status of my phone order on Amazon, it wanted me to revise it but didn't tell me how - so I called a phone rep to be told that I didn't need to revise it. And I was supposed to get free 2-day shipping but got charged shipping because I bought a microSD card along with the order. Also unclear who to contact - Amazon or T-mobile - about certain issues - and one issue wasted a bit of my time because of that. If $200 doesn't matter to you, I would recommend buying from T-mobile for $249 instead of $49 from Amazon to get the best possible customer service and the flexibility to change plans at will.
Summary:
In sum - once setup and customization is complete, it's a very good phone, but learning how to set it up and use the rich feature set to best advantage takes too long, and managing memory is a nuisance. This has the feel of an "early adopter" type of devise that requires a certain level of dedication to harness all the power. This may be a non-issue if the IT department of your employer sets up the phone for you and helps get you started.
Buying it from Amazon turned out to be enough of a hassle that I question whether it was worth saving $200.
Now that I've bought the phone and spent the time learning how to best use it, I'll stick with it. But it would have worked out much better for me if the defaults were very similar to a regular cell phone - or it had a way to easily make it like a regular cell phone (perhaps the setup up process could have offered three choices like - what kind of user will you be - simple phone user, moderate communicator, power user - and then it configures with default settings that make the most sense for that type of user).
It was tough to choose between the Blackberry Curve 8320 and the Nokia 6086, but the deciding factor turned out to be the 3.5mm jack (I didn't like the two Samsung models because I find real keys easier to use than membrane keys).
The Nokia 6086 had equivalent call quality (with no hiss) in my 5 minute in-store test. If it had including a 3.5mm jack and identical bundled headset, then that probably would have been a better choice for me. But I am satisfied with the 8320 and will probably stick with it for years - and I am using functions (some useful, some fun) that are not available on the 6086. I just hope I have the discipline to use it as a phone, not a time draining toy.
Customer Rating: Summary: Blackberry vs. Treo
Comment: Pros of Blackberry: WiFi usage. My old phone (Treo 600 from Sprint) couldn't pick up cell reception in my apartment. With Blackberry Curve 8820 I can talk all I want at home. (I'm using my WiFi connection but still get charged for cell minutes; you don't need to buy the WiFi router, it'll detect any WiFi in your neighborhood.)
Cons: I miss my Treo! The Treo seemed more user friendly. Some things I miss on my Treo: 1) instant ringer off with button on top of phone. With the Blackberry, you have to go in the interface and select ringer off. This can be a pain if you're in the movie theater and at the last moment have to turn your ringer or phone off. 2) The Treo had a vibrate and ring option. With the BB, you can only choose vibrate or sound. There is no dual function. 3) Ring tones. Both phones come with ring tones but in the Treo, you could select it from the menu when you were in the phone book interface. With the BB, you can select volume only. The ring tones aren't in the preferences either. Its hidden down deep in the menu after about 6 click strokes. 4) Treo has touchscreen interface, BB does not. The touchscreen is a real nice option when you're fed up with the BB trackball. 5) The Treo comes with a nice user manual about 100 pages. The BB comes with a 1 page folding user guide. You have to go find the manual elsewhere (I use TMobile's BB manual online ~ so that means I have to be connected to the internet to figure something out. 6) Synching. Treo has the nice Desktop software so if you have to make massive revisions or want to copy something from the internet straight to your Palm, you can do it via the Palm Desktop software. The BB software is just a synch manager. Its not a real desktop software. You HAVE to use a third party software such at Outlook (doesn't work with Outlook express), Yahoo, Google, or other. Since I'm a student and don't have access (nor money) to buy the Microsoft office suite, I've had a heck of a time synching my BB to Yahoo and its a pain to have to do everything in Yahoo (I miss the Palm Desktop software because it was like the Palm but on your desktop so the learning curve was low).
The BB is great for business professionals who have Outlook and BB has push technology so you can read up to 10 email accounts on your BB. This is a cool function (but quickly gets out of hand because now your interface has email, SMS, and in/outgoing call logs). You can set it show it only shows up one or the other but then you've just paid for push technology (about $30) and now aren't using it.
Too bad Palm isn't catching up as fast as BB because I think its more user friendly.
However, once you get use to digging in the menu options in the BB, its not too bad. PS - another note on the sparse user manual in the BB, you have to play around with the menu and you'll find alot of undocumented shortcuts. I wish they would just document these up front!
