T-Mobile's Blackberry Curve - Worth Every Penny

It's not just sexy. But it is sexy. T-Mobile's new Blackberry Curve is beautiful to behold. Available in titanium or gold finish, it's nothing short of flashy.

I didn't intend to upgrade my Blackberry Pearl just yet. The Pearl is a fine machine and nothing to scoff at as far as functionality is concerned. Again, it's an attractive piece of hardware with lots of features. But when my roller ball kept locking up and then my speaker started acting up, I had a choice. Since it was no longer under warranty, I could either fork out $300 for another Pearl or spend the big bucks ($500) on the spanky new Curve. Being somewhat of a techno geek, I opted to upgrade my mobile phone experience to the Curve, and I've never been happier.

The great thing about going from the Pearl to the Curve is that it's still the same familiar Blackberry experience. The menus are easy to navigate and intuitive. The buttons are all nicely laid out so as to be optimally useful (and they are customizable). Like the Pearl, the Curve has the Blackberry Maps feature which provides street maps for the United States. It seems, however, that T-Mobile doesn't offer the built-in GPS feature that some other networks do.

Now for the differences: the Curve is bigger than the Pearl and similar in size to the 8700 series. The Curve is fairly slim, however, and not as bulky as the 8700. It feels comfortable in your hand. Unlike the Pearl, the Curve has wi-fi capabilities. When connected to your wireless network at home or any wi-fi hotspot, you can use the internet at much faster speeds than normal. T-Mobile also now offers an add-on plan that gives you unlimited calls and internet usage over wi-fi for $19.95 per month. This is a great feature for me as I work from home and consequently spend a lot of time there. I reduced the minutes in my regular plan and added the wi-fi plan to see how much I could save each month. I'm anxious to see the results.

The Curve can also be tethered to your laptop and used as a modem where there is no internet connection. I haven't tested this feature yet, but I can imagine how useful it will come in while traveling.

Surfing the internet on the Curve is much better than on the Pearl due to the larger screen size. Recently RIM has partnered with several websites to create custom applications for the Blackberry. I currently have the Yahoo! Go application on my Curve, along with the Facebook application. They are both very sleak and make my Yahoo! and Facebook experiences a ton better on my Curve. I hope other websites will join this trend. (Associated Content would be a great one!)

In conclusion, I could not be happier with my Blackberry Curve. It is great looking and highly functional for email, internet and phone calls.