RIM BlackBerry® Curve™ 8330 Cell Phone

I've used the Sprint 8330 Curve for about 6 months now, having moved from a Palm Treo which used the Palm OS.  I would not have changed except that the Palm mysteriously refused to sync with my desktop one day, and after a month and 20 hours of time between me and my IT manager fighting with the Treo it simply would not communicate with my desktop...so I changed.

One thing that struck me immediately was the compact size and crisp graphics of the screen. it's a smaller screen than the Treo, but perfect visible, and readable even in sunlight. I was stunned by the ease of setting up a personal email account - just enter a user name and password, and you're done. It can't get more simple.

Make no mistake - this is a business-oriented phone, and it shows in some very odd shortcomings.

- This phone cannot display HTML emails in their native format. You see all the HTML code, and it's a mess. This is stupid and inexcusable.  Yes, you can buy a $19 software package to fix this, but why should you? My Treo did this natively.
-You may be able to have more than one email account, but the Curve drops all the emails into the same inbox - they're a mess and all mixed together.  Yes, you can also buy a $19 software package to fix this and separate the inboxes, but why should you have to? again, my Treo did this natively.
- Various kinds of audio/video websites won't work in this phone. It's hard to predict which, but it's just not media-oriented at all.
- The native Blackberry browser is famed as the single worst pece of software to be used on a cell phone. It won't open any number of pages, and it constantly balks and fails to perform.  Most users download Opera Mini immediately, but it cannot be set to operate as the default browser, so if you try to open a web page and the browser refuses, you either give up or go through a very inconvenient copy and past routine that takes a while to figure out.

Surely such problems as HTML email viewing and the browser issue will be fixed in later OS versions, but until then they are small, constant irritants.

BUT - what is it supposed to do?  Give you instant access to emails - and it does. It syncs beautifully with MS outlook,, the most popular office suite in the world.  All your contacts, calendar and emails will be at your fingertips all the time. And whenever you spot a phone number in a page of text, just highlight it and the Curve will dial it for you!  Re-typing is held to a minimum.  Texting, email and appointments basically work transparently with office - you can accept and confirm meetings, forward messages, and easily call from text in messages or in your address book.

The phone is - a phone, but a good phone.  It has good volume control (and these 58-year-old ears aren't quite as sharp as they used to be) both up and down, and although the volume control is so nearly level with the side of the phone that it tends to require a fingertip, it's not hard to change volume. 3-way calling is a snap, and all the phone features work well.  Coverage in the front range of Colorado and in hilly Eastern Washington where I often travel is very good - it's almost never out of signal range.

The keyboard is easy to use, the backlighting is handy and the screen's automatic light-sensing is handy and assures you'll get more brightness in dark areas. 

And thank heavens for the person who invented charging via Mini-USB port.  It's really handy to plug the Curve into the USB cable on my desk every morning.  The charge will last two days with moderate use, but the USB charging connection makes it easy to grab a charge from a desktop, laptop or portable charger.

Overall, I'm happy with the Curve and await steady improvements in its software shortcomings as BB gets pressured to improve the consumer/audio/video aspects of the software.  I don't like paying the extra charge for their Enterprise service, but I want to use all the capabilities of this phone and I'm not about to let anything sit there unused.