Good Choice For First Time Smartphone Buyers

The term crackberry isn't just a clever play on words, it holds truth. The Tour is great and all, but a bit more than the casual BlackBerry user wants to spend, and let's face it the Storm just isn't what RIM wants it to be. The Curve hits the sweet spot of price, functionality and cool, but it's getting long in the tooth. So how does RIM make their most popular device even better? How about making it smaller, faster and adding WiFi? As the CDMA kin to the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520, the RIM Curve 8530 for Verizon Wireless is more of an entry level device, so you won't find some of the higher end features found on the BlackBerry Tour, such as world roaming capabilities and a high resolution display. However, the Curve 8530 certainly brings some worthy upgrades to the aging Curve 8330, including a next gen processor, an optical trackpad, and dedicated media controls, and one key feature that even the Tour lacks: WiFi. The phone's design isn't our favorite, but it offers more than T Mobile's version of the phone and costs $30 less at $99.99 (with a two year contract), making it an incredible value for first time smartphone buyers.

Design
The RIM BlackBerry Curve 8530 for Verizon shares a similar design with its GSM counterpart, the Curve 8520. For this review, we'll concentrate more on the different features and performance of the Curve 8530 but you can find more information about design in our full review of the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520 for T-Mobile as well as our hands on photo gallery of the BlackBerry Curve 8530.

Features
Despite being more of an entry level device, the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8530 comes with a good set of features, more so than its T Mobile counterpart. As a phone, it offers a speakerphone, voice activated dialing, smart dialing, conference calling, speed dial, and text and multimedia messaging with threaded chat view. You can also add Verizon's Visual Voice Mail service for an additional $2.99 per month. There's also a link to MyVerizon to get information about your account, such as voice and data usage, account balance, and features. Other Verizon services available on the Curve 8530 include VZ Navigator, V Cast Music, and VZ Navigator.

The phone's address book is only limited by the available memory and has room in each contact file for multiple numbers, e-mail addresses, work and home addresses, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo, group ID, and or custom ringtone. A shortcut to VzwTones is loaded on the device so you can download more ringtones to your device. Aside from the address book, other personal information management tools available on the Curve 8530 include a calendar, a task list, a memo pad, a voice recorder, and a calculator.

The Curve 8530 is Bluetooth friendly with support for mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, hands free kits, audio/video remote, serial port, and dial-up networking. Unlike the T Mobile version, the Curve 8530 has GPS/GPS, 3G, and Wi-Fi. We're certainly happy to see Verizon bringing more WiFi equipped devices to its lineup as it provides another way of getting online. Now, if only RIM would release a better BlackBerry browser with easier navigation and more features to complete the package. The smartphone is running BlackBerry OS 5.0, however, so there are some slight improvements to the browser, such as quicker page rendering and speed improvements because of faster JavaScript and CSS processing.

As with all BlackBerry models, messaging is the Curve 8530's strongpoint. It can sync with your company's BlackBerry Enterprise server, offering support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise, to deliver corporate e mail in real time. With BlackBerry Internet Service, you can also access up to 10 personal or business POP3 or IMAP4 e mail accounts. The smartphone also comes preloaded with several instant messaging clients, including Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, Google Talk, and BlackBerry Messenger.

Performance
The aspect where the 8530 really hits it out of the park is with its operating system. The Curve 8530 features BlackBerry OS 5.0, currently the only device on the Sprint lineup to do so. The 5.0 operating system isn't revolutionary, but offers nice many little improvements, such as wirelessly syncing of contacts with certain email providers, the ability to flag messages for follow up, better application permission management, and vastly improved ability to manage ringing profile settings. The processor on the Curve 8530 is less powerful than some of its contemporaries, including the Tour, and sometimes it would hang. For most of what you do most of the time, however, you won't notice this lack of power. Power users, on the other hand, should consider a more powerful device.

Camera
The built in camera on new generation Curve doesn't have a flash, which is a step backward for BlackBerry. Its 2 megapixel camera also lacks auto-focus and has a lower resolution that the cameras found on other models (Bold 9700, Tour, Storm). Given these considerations however the camera still performs quite well.

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