BlackBerry Curve 8320 Review - Messaging
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Alfredo Padilla Published on October 10, 2007 Comment on this |
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Supported E-mail Services (6.5)
As is standard with BlackBerries, the Curve allows you to access POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail accounts. Unfortunately it's still missing an easy setup wizard for popular services like Gmail or Yahoo! e-mail, but you can set these up if you know the proper server settings. Push Email (4.0)
As you would expect from any BlackBerry, the Curve supports push e-mail via BlackBerry servers. If you don't have access to a BlackBerry server via your company you can set up up an individual BlackBerry account with T-Mobile to have your e-mail pushed to you. The Curve does not support any other form of push e-mail like Microsoft's Exchange Server or Good.
Multiple E-mail Accounts (10.0)
The Curve is able to support up to 10 different e-mail accounts, which should be enough for just about anyone. We only give points for up to five e-mail accounts, meaning the Curve gets our highest score here.
HTML and Attachements (4.0)
BlackBerries still can't handle HTML-encoded e-mail, a shame given their focus on messaging. Support for attachments was a mixed bag. We sent an e-mail to our AOL account with five attachments, but none of them showed up in the e-mail we received on the Curve. We then sent each of the attachments in an e-mail by themselves. We were able to receive and view our Word, zip, Excel, and PDF documents, but our PowerPoint document didn't make it through. It seems attachment support on BlackBerry devices is different every time we test them, and we suspect server side issues have a lot to do with this.
E-mail Customizations (2.0)
The only e-mail customization available on the BlackBerry Curve 8320 is the ability to add signatures. There's no support for changing the number of lines each e-mail takes up, font size, or type.
Time to a New Message (11.76)
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 1.70 | 11.76 |
| Nokia E90 | 3.43 | 5.83 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8300 (AT&T) | 0.95 | 21.05 |
| HTC Mogul | 6.22 | 3.22 |
| T-Mobile Dash | 2.53 | 7.91 |
| Apple iPhone | 1.90 | 10.53 |
Email Usability (10.0)
The Curve is a typical BlackBerry, providing one of the easiest and most efficient e-mail environments you will see on any handset. Scrolling through e-mails is easy due to the trackball, while the space bar allows you to easily page up or down. You can view all messages in your main inbox or view account specific messages, each of which are located on your home screen. The menu button brings up a long menu of choices, but again the trackball saves you time by making moving up and down menu lists quick and easy. We recommend you play with the trackball sensitivity, though, so you can move through lists faster.
Supported IM Services (1.0)
MMS Support (6.0)
MMS has not traditionally been a strong suit for BlackBerry devices due to their lack of multimedia features. With the advent of BlackBerry devices that have cameras, like the Curve, MMS support has become more important. Thankfully, support here is pretty solid. MMS messages are sent to the Curve's unified inbox, where all e-mail and text messages also end up. You cannot turn an SMS into an MMS, however you can easily send an MMS message from the camera or album software.
SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
Smiley faces probably aren't very important to the business users the Curve is targeted at, and the support is correspondingly poor. Smiley faces sent to the Curve are left in plain text rather than turned into graphical representations, and there are no shortcuts to easily insert smiley faces into a message.
SMS/MMS Ease of Use (7.0)
MMS and SMS messages on the BlackBerry Curve 8320 are included in the unified inbox that is also used by e-mail by default. You can change this in the settings or allow it to be set by the theme you are using. Creating a text or multimedia message simply requires you to choose the appropriate option from the menu while in your messaging program. Composing a message is as simple and straightforward as composing an e-mail. Our only real issue is that you have to decide whether you're going to send a text or multimedia message beforehand, so you can't turn a text message into a multimedia message, as you can on Palm Treo devices.
Time to a New SMS Message (2.37)
To see how easy it is to write a new SMS message we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a new SMS message on the screen. We repeat this test five times and take the average for our score. The BlackBerry Curve 8320 took an average of 4.22 seconds to open a new SMS dialogue. This is almost twice as long as on the AT&T version of the Curve, and once again we found the myFaves interface is probably the culprit. Tests done when myFaves was turned off were almost a full second faster. It's unfortunate the lag caused by this application makes what is normally one of the speediest messaging phones we've seen into a middling device.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 4.22 | 2.37 |
| Nokia E90 | 1.99 | 5.03 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8300 (AT&T) | 1.97 | 5.08 |
| HTC Mogul | 5.46 | 1.83 |
| T-Mobile Dash | 2.12 | 4.72 |
| Apple iPhone | 2.62 | 3.82 |
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