Research in Motion’s BlackBerry is struggling to stay in the competition with Android and iOS smartphones which are leading the market. The only reason people buy a BlackBerry these days is because of its Blackberry messenger or BBM service.
Blackberry Curve series is quite popular in India because of its affordable price. Blackberry curve 8520 was a hot selling Smartphone from Blackberry since it was available at a price of below Rs.10,000. So in order to continue with it and keep the customers happy BlackBerry came up with an upgrade for 8520.
Look and Feel
The phone is slimmer than its predecessor Curve 8520. Curve 9220 is made up of good quality plastic and has rubberized sides which help you to grip the phone firmly. It has a dedicated BBM key on the left side of handset which can be customized for apps other than BBM but works only when the phone is unlocked. With the BBM key there is a mini-USB port which helps you to charge the handset and connect to a PC. The lock key is on top of the handset like other blackberry phones but the media keys are absent.
On the right side the 9220 has a dedicated camera key but it also doesn’t work when the phone is locked. With the camera key, there are the volume rocker keys. The QWERTY keyboard has hard plastic, well spaced out keys which gave us a comfortable typing experience.
Performance
The phone has a 2.44” TFT LCD display with a resolution of 320×240 which is decent enough for the kind of usage this phone has. It has a 3.5mm jack on top of the phone for audio output and the output is decent enough when tested with a standard pair of wired headset since the review kit we received didn’t had the bundled headset.
The phone runs on the BlackBerry’s OS 7.1 which supports FM radio unlike in the previous versions. The BBM experience is still the same so no change in that was experienced.
Curve 9220 has a 2.2 megapixel camera which was average in proper lighting conditions so it’s better to not expect much from the camera.
Battery life of the phone is pretty good as it is powered by a powerful 1450 mAh battery. It gave us 1.5 days of average usage which includes calls, web browsing and BBM.
The phone runs on 800 MHz processor with 512MB RAM and 512 ROM which is good enough for the phone and the type of application it is going to run. The memory can be extended upto 32GB with a micro SD card slot. During the review we didn’t faced any lag in the performance. But like the other BlackBerry phones you have to close each and every application by going to the menu in order to avoid unnecessary memory usage.
Blackberry Curve 9220 lacks 3G which is a downer since these days every phone in this budget comes with a 3G connectivity option. The internet browsing speed was good enough with Wi-Fi since 2G speeds are not that great. But the default browser can cause problem while viewing the default web pages since it need a lot of zooming in n out.
BlackBerry Curve 9220 price in India
BlackBerry Curve 9220 costs Rs. 10,500
Final Verdict
If you need a phone only for BBM and social networking then this is the phone for you or if you are already a BlackBerry Curve 8520 user and need an upgrade then go get this Smartphone without a doubt.
