RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520 review

Music and video

However, battery life will plummet if you decide to use the Curve as your MP3 player, and perhaps surprisingly there’s every chance you will. For sitting atop the 8520 you’ll find three buttons: two for skipping to the next or previous track, the middle one to play or pause music. The play/pause button triples up as a mute for stopping the phone ringing if you get a call you want to ignore. It’s all very convenient; with the Curve sitting in your pocket that’s precisely where you’d want the controls to be.

There’s also a full-size 3.5mm jack for plugging in headphones of your choosing; RIM bundles a basic set. The music player itself will never win rave reviews – we’re not sure we’d want to navigate a huge library of tracks through its simple interface – and also note there’s limited storage on the 8520’s built-in flash memory: just 256MB. However, a micro-SD card offers room for expansion.

We should also give brief mention to the 2-megapixel camera, which takes 1,600 x 1,200 pictures. It’s nothing special, as you’ll see if you flick to the sample photo in the gallery above (click Full Size to launch the gallery), but it’s fine for snaps in decent light.

Traditional strengths

The full-size Qwerty keyboard and superb email features of BlackBerrys have become almost so predictable as to barely be worth mentioning, but if this is your first email phone you’d be suitably pleased. The keyboard, while plasticky, is designed with quick typing in mind, which is why there’s a decent amount of space around the buttons (this helps stop annoying accidental clicks).

The BlackBerry Internet Service is also present and correct, allowing you to set up ten email addresses on the device and flip between them with ease. If you’ve never experienced the addictive pleasure of "push" email, you’ll be impressed. We were less impressed by BlackBerry’s Twitter client, Twitterberry, which makes it far too difficult to see what other people are tweeting about.

Fortunately that’s where the hordes of BlackBerry extras come in. For example, one PC Pro reader recommended Yatca, and more are available through BlackBerry App World.