The new BlackBerry Curve 8520 is easy on the wallet as the company tries to venture out in the mainstream market. The phone looks similar to the BlackBerry models except for one new addition, that’s the track-pad. This replaces the mini-trackball which was standard featured on all BlackBerry models.

Design and Looks
The Curve 8520 stands at 109x60x13.9 mm and weighs 106 grams. The phone is completely made of plastic and can easily succumb to smudges and stains. The keyboard is complete QWERTY on the Curve 8520 but is made of downgraded lower quality plastic. But that said, it does not affect the typing on the phone. The keys on the keypad are sufficiently placed apart from each other giving a comfortable reach.

The top of the display houses the earpiece and LED status light. The new touch with the optical trackpad sits between the display and the keyboard of the phone. The feature is quick and provides great usage. The two buttons ‘call’ and ‘back’ keys sit besides the track pad.The left side of the BlackBerry Curve 8520 incorporates the 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB slot whereas the right side of the phone includes the volume rocker.

The striking part of the phone is the top head of the phone where there are dedicated music keys placed which are a little hard to press but sport function as play/pause. The rear of the phone houses the camera which is a 2 mega pixel one.

The interface of the phone is the BlackBerry OS v4.6. There are few drawbacks with the interface and its organization on the phone. For example the file manager has been placed in the media options menu. The home screen of the Curve 8520 holds 6 default shortcuts. The performance of the phone is decent and the track pad can get zappy some times.

The phone features Smart Dial and does a great job with plenty of contacts stored on the phone. Messaging is a breeze and can handle SMS , MMS and email and comes with the BlackBerry instant messenger preinstalled. Music Player on the BlackBerry Curve 8520 is average and does its job. The player is able to sort the files automatically by artist, album and genre and the tracks can be searched gradually by typing also.

The Curve 8520 sports a meager 2 megapixel camera without focus with a maximum image resolution of 1600×1200 pixels. The camera UI is again a pain and does not give the ease of usage. Some of the settings included on the phone are the white balance, color effects and image stabilization.

The phone offers a good Wi-Fi but does not sport any 3G support. On the wired connection front the phone comes along with a microUSB port which can be used for connecting to a computer and for charging. The handset also has the Bluetooth with A2DP incorporated and a memory card slot too.

The phone’s browser does an excellent job with the mobile sites but fails on the normal websites. Page rendering is neat and the Opera Mini 5 does an excellent job. The Organizer does its job with decent features and for a little recreation time there are 5 preinstalled games onboard.

Overall the phone is light on features with omission of 3G and GPS but does a good job in appealing customers for a decent BlackBerry which can get their job done without spending a fortune.

Features

• 2.46″ 65K-color TFT landscape display of QVGA resoultion
• Comfortable four-row full QWERTY keyboard
• Quad-band GSM support, Wi-FI connectivity
• 2 megapixel camera with fixed focus
• 512MHz CPU
• BlackBerry OS v 4.6 with responsive trackpad navigation
• Hot-swappable microSD card slot ( up to 16GB )