No longer neglecting its Direct Connect customers, Sprint has extended its BlackBerry offering to include the Curve 8350i for its Nextel clientele. This $149 smart phone sports all of the features we’ve come to love in the BlackBerry Curve, but with Nextel push-to-talk capabilities, RIM’s latest OS Version 4.6, and a full HTML Web browser. It’s a solid pick for business customers who need to remain in constant contact.
Design
The Curve 8350i is the sharpest 8300 series Curve we’ve ever come across. The piano black device has a similarly colored keyboard with yellow accents around its trackball and push-to-talk button. While the 8350i has the same 340 x 320-pixel, 2.5-inch display as older Curves, the resolution is not as high as current BlackBerrys, such as the Curve 8900 (480 x 360) or Bold (480 x 320). The 8350i, at 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.7 inches, is a bit bigger than the standard Curve (which measures 4.2 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches). The reason for its extra bulk is likely the iDEN radio and the required room for the larger 1400-mAh lithium ion battery, which replaces the standard 1150-mAh one.
A small yellow Nextel logo decorates the bottom of the unit. On the left you’ll find a 2.5mm headphone jack, which unfortunately replaces the much more usable 3.5mm jack found on most Curves. There’s also a microUSB charging port on the left side. Volume controls and a quick-launch button that defaults to the camera launcher are on the right side.
Interface
The Curve 8350i is the first 8300 series device to sport the newer RIM 4.6 operating system user interface, much like the Bold and Curve 8900 devices do. However, the UI doesn’t look as crisp on the 8350i as it does on those aforementioned phones due to its lower-resolution display.
We appreciated the monochrome icons and the inclusion of software like DataViz’s Documents to Go, which lets you make small edits and create Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents on the go. We experienced a few lags and hangs, but nothing more than we’d expect from older Curves running the same 312-MHz processor.
