Research In Motion (RIM) has released the low-priced smartphone to hook up the youth or lower market with the BlackBerry Curve 9220 smartphone. This is the member of Curve series and it can be considered as the slight improvements of the previously well-liked Gemini (8520) smartphone. The following is the BlackBerry Curve 9220 review for your own consideration whether it is worth to obtain especially if you are owner of the Gemini handset.
To start with this BlackBerry Curve 9220 review, we will evaluate the design, dimension and the display of this promising smartphone. At the first look, you will see that the phone has the similar style with Gemini but it looks more compact. It measures the same height and width namely 109 mm and 60 mm but with a bit thinner body of 13 mm. The 9220 is also lighter featuring its 102 grams of body-weight.
At the front side, there will be the 2.44 inches TFT display with 65K colors, 320x240p and 164 ppi. Based on this spec, the phone is sadly boasts the smaller screen than Gemini but fortunately it has the higher pixel density. Below the screen, there are four keys including Call, Menu, Back, End and right in the middle of those keys there’s touch-sensitive optical trackpad. You will notice that layout of the keys comes with a bit different style and also the Call and End keys are now white-colored as well as the rest of other keys.
Other significant improvements will be in terms of RAM and operating system. The phone has been loaded with the latest BlackBerry OS 7.1 along with the 512 MB of ROM and 512 MB of RAM. The good thing of this OS is that it comes with the enhanced WebKit browser that will support JavaScript in order to render web-pages a lot quicker than the previous BlackBerry OS does. Moreover, there is also the integrated social apps including Facebook and also Twitter. In the aspect of data access, there will be no betterments as the phone runs on the same quad-band GPRS and EDGE network.
The camera of 2 MP is now completed with the Flash feature but without auto-focus unfortunately.
Towards the connectivity features, the BlackBerry Curve 9220 has been upgraded to the Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and A2DP as well as it’s furnished with the NFC capability and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) dedicated key. The ultimate refinements will be the longer battery life of Li-ion which will deliver the standby time of about 432 hours, talk-time of up to 7 hours and music playback of 28 hours.
Okay, now it’s time to put this BlackBerry Curve 9220 review into a conclusion. The advantages of this smartphone are the lighter weight, higher pixel density, latest OS, bigger RAM and ROM, longer battery life, better browsing capability, better Bluetooth features and it is advantageously an NFC-enabled phone. However, it lacks 3G, GPS and autofocus for its low quality camera. But overall, it can be considered as a great upgrade for the Gemini especially if you wish for a longer lasting smartphone with the adequate web browser. The phone has been initially released in India with the price of Rs 10999 or about $210. [IS]
