BlackBerry Curve 9220 Review

Robert Sovereign-Smith

The BlackBerry Curve 9220 arrived at Digit’s office about 10 days prior to its launch. As fate would have it, my own BlackBerry Curve 9360 mysteriously died a day before the Curve 9220 arrived – stuff conspiracy theories are made of. What this means is that the 9220 has actually been my primary phone for the past 10 days, and thus it’s truly been tested in “real-world” usage scenarios. For those wondering what exactly my real world is like: it’s been rattled about in my car door holder, as I pretend I’m driving a moon buggy on our pot-hole-laden roads, had my cat knock it off a table (just because she could), got suntanned when it was forgotten on the car dashboard on a proper Mumbai summer afternoon, dropped when the stupid silicone cover got stuck in the pocket of my jeans... the works.

I’m happy to report that it’s still working, so it’s certainly a tough little thing, and the aforementioned evil silicone cover that it came with is actually a boon for careless, scatterbrained, butterfingered people like me.

Look and feel
What look and feel? The thing looks just like the older BlackBerry Curve 8520 or the Curve 9300.

As someone using it after a Curve 9360, it’s certainly a step backwards – it’s irritatingly fatter, but not 7K worth of irritation, which is how much cheaper it is than the 9360. The BlackBerry Curve 9220 is a tiny bit slimmer than the 8520 and 9300, and has actual buttons for Call, Menu, Return and End Call keys, but that’s about it in the looks department.

The only immediate difference you will notice is on the top of the phone, where the media keys are now replaced with a single key to lock the phone. Now, I know many people will think, “Wow, no shortcut to media, or quick pause function, that sucks”. Believe me, as someone who comes from a family of 8520/9300 owners, those stupid rubber keys on the top just crumble and break after about a year or two of use, and then you find yourself running back and forth trying to get them replaced. This is a step up if you ask me, and if you happen to be one of the 6 people on Earth who bought a BlackBerry solely for music and media, just change what the side keys do through the OS, under the Convenience Keys setting.

The convenience key on the left actually proclaims “BBM”, but don’t worry you can change it to something else. You won’t, of course, because that’s exactly what you’d buy this phone for, but it’s good to know that it can be done.

Only when you open the battery cover do you realise the differences from the 8520 and 9300. To start with, just when you’ve gotten used to one way of prying a Curve open (just lift the cover at the notch provided), RIM goes and changes it to a slide downwards to open motion – a very minor irritant that disappears as soon as you see that big beautiful battery underneath. The battery takes up the whole space in the back, and thus the memory card slot is moved from beside the battery (all previous Curves) to above it near the camera. It’s angled slightly outwards as well, so as to aid in easy removal. More about that beautiful battery to come...

Pop open the back, and the memory card slot and the battery are the first things you notice

More about the BlackBerry Curve 9220's Features, Performance, and Our Verdict in the pages that follow