Earlier today I got my hot hands on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520, and thanks to our lovely art team we’ve managed to get a few nice photos to highlight its features.

Front on, the most interesting item is slap bang in the middle: a trackpad. This works almost identically to a normal laptop trackpad, except you press it to select on an item. Opinion in the PC Pro office is so far mixed: I found it intuitive, though it’s a little fiddly as you can’t jump about the screen as quickly as I’d like, whereas our esteemed news & features editor, Barry Collins, simply couldn’t get on with it at all.

There’s a full Qwerty keyboard, which is usable but not spectacular. This is mainly because the buttons feel a little cheap and plasticky (as does the whole phone), but also because it isn’t the widest of devices.

The 8520’s most heralded innovation, however, is the introduction of these three buttons: one for skipping back a track, one for jumping forward, and one for pause/play. They sit atop the unit and work well in practice, though obviously the BlackBerry’s music player is hardly going to rival the iPhone’s.

The two bobbles you see down the right-hand side act as the volume controls, and there are a further two “bobble buttons” elsewhere: one on either side, roughly in the middle of the unit. One activates voice commands, the other the 2mp digital camera (which also shoots video).

The screen is also worth a mention. It’s not big, with just a 320 x 240 resolution, but it’s sharp, bright and clear – if not as vibrant as the BlackBerry Bold. Crucially for some, it also lacks 3G and GPS radios.

We’ll be putting the Curve through our full range of tests over the coming days, but it’s undoubtedly got a tough fight on its hands. Competition comes from the Nokia E63, the Nokia E71 and RIM’s own BlackBerry 8900 – even though the 8520 is being priced at a competitive £200 inc VAT on pay-as-you-go contracts.