Lastly, you have a calendar. It is a basic scientific calculator that allows the user to do simple equations but again it keeps the job done. As far as a smart phone goes, the Curve offers everything the user would need to have their management stored on their phone.
Multimedia is a big aspect of the Curve just like it was on the Pearl. We’ll check out the media player here which servers as HUB for all the different things you can do such as music. Videos, ring tones, and pictures, as well as voice notes.
The music player is nice and simple. It is iPod asking if it's software, we’ll go down to the artist, see what we have here then they can go to the albums by that artist and then you have a list of all the different songs. Click on it and then bring the player up. The player is attractive and up-looking we haven’t neat up here. But as you can see, it displays the album art as well as the artist and song information.
Scrolling the ball controls and the volume rocker on the side does the volume. The video player is very similar. We’ll check out the sample BlackBerry video here and again, we’ll see if the player interface is the same since we’re at full screen mode, the player controls would disappear while the video is playing. Video playback is nice and smooth and we really have no complains about it.
The pictures, service at very simple picture album. You can see we have our sample pictures loaded here and you can simply scroll through. Selecting it brings it up full screen and the user can choose to set it as their home screen or other options.
We like the simplicity of the music player in the media application offered by the BlackBerry Curve. In addition, Sprints included some extra features such as the Sprint Music store and Sprint TV. The Sprint Music store gives user the ability to download music directly to their handset as well as side load music and play in Sprint’s player.
Here we see the store interface. It is pretty simple. It’s a little bit different graphically in your standard phone although it does like the same as the other smart phones such as Windows Mobile devices. Searching for tracks is very easy. Simply scroll down on the bottom and you can choose the search option. Type in the users name, hit the track ball, and you can search your title or artist or both. You can search the artist and it will give us different options. You can start by song, artist, genres, or albums.
Again, we’ll pick a song to have it start playing. Similar to the BlackBerry Player, the album art shows as well as the artist information. It is really just another way to do the same thing but it’s nice the users have the option to download music over there on the Sprint Curve.
Sprint TV is the other exclusive applications to the Sprint device. It’s similar to any other Sprint TV applications seen over the past years or so. You have the Sprint radio integrated into this as well as you can see or you can choose something here. Let’s go to CNN and see what their streaming live. Again, this will pull up in the main media player to the BlackBerry application and we’ll go full screen after just a second.
The video in here is not quite as good as Verizon TV. It is only 15 frames per second as closed to 30.But as you can see the video is relatively smooth and the audio matches up. Like we said, it’s not as good as Verizon’s V CAST TV servers. However, that’s not something that’s offered on the curve so it will give the advantage here on the Sprint.
For such a consumer friendly in a range of a device, we’re not sure why Verizon doesn’t include a lot of these features such as TV, music, and instant messaging capabilities.
One of the stumbling points of the Curve is his browser. We load it up here. It actually has pretty quick load times. Something we didn’t see with the Pearl which we like to see. It does for over the EV-DO revisions here on network, so we would expect quick times.
We’ll pull up the history here and go to Phone Arena. Phone Arena is a fairly complex HTML site and while the BlackBerry supports to actually handle its email sites as we’ll see here in the minute, the kind of chokes up. The first thing you’ll notice is that the images don’t load all the time. You can bring up the contacts menu and choose to load more or all images. Concern to this we won’t load any, and we can save some time.
One thing you do see is the mouse can move in all directions here. This is something we like to see implemented in to the main menu but for now, we’ll deal with it with in the browser. It’s not an extremely ideal however for a large page like this. There are shortcuts and we could hit P to get to the bottom of the page. One thing we notice is that right now you see a blank thing over here. However, when will roll over it there’s actually some text.
Were not quite sure why the Curve does this, but obviously users can miss information because of it. RIM does offer two views on this, we’ll let switch over to the page view and get more with desktop type overlook. This is the kind of like what you see in Opera mini. However, it is still not rendered extremely well. You have the page overall and you can scroll up and down.
As you can see, the page and the scrolling extremely smoothly and I’m getting ahead of myself. This can be a little bit frustrating when browsing especially with large pages. Seem that you want to look at this article here, you tap, tap in and we’ll get the first zoom level, and then we tap it again, and then we get the second one.
Now let’s take a look at the more optimized cellphone page. Again, we’ll go back on to our history and pull up Mobile YouTube. Being optimized for the phone, this one loads a lot quicker. This is basically a WAP site and certain page just like the ESPN’s still default to their WAP pages which make it a lot easier.
We’ll check out this first video here and show you that YouTube videos are able to play natively on the Curve. However there are little bit small and don’t take up the full screen. Even though we are on a full screen mode, this is as large as going to get. This Sprint Curve comes pre-packaged with consumer friendly applications such as AOL instant messenger, GOOGLE Talk and Yahoo messaging.
While the latter two are loadable on the Verizon Curve, there is no indication in the Verizon manual, the Verizon website or anywhere in the actual phone it self that this can be done. They user would have to go independently find this and load them on their device.
In the IM application, which is the most popular, is the Instant messaging application is exclusive to Sprint. Also preloaded are applications like Facebook. Another thing that Verizon users could load if they want it to, but I have no idea that it even existed if they don’t do their own research.
Since the Curve is marketed more towards the consumer, we don’t know why Verizon shows to strip their phone of these features. Another thing that sets the phones apart is Sprint’s multimedia suite of the Sprint music store and Sprint TV. Again, these are products that Verizon offers on their other phones but have chosen to strip them from the Curve. All in all, sprint has a much more attractive and friendly device for the average consumer.
The Curve obviously has the features that any businessman was going to want including push email and create PDA and calendar functions. However, this can be found on any BlackBerry and what sets the Curve part, is it supposedly consumer friendly features set. Sprint has chosen to run with this, where as Verizon has nuded their phone. In the end, we don’t see why anybody given the choice could pick the Verizon Curve over this.
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