RIM BlackBerry Curve 8320

The new RIM BlackBerry Curve 8320 ($449.99; $249.99 and up with two-year contract) for T-Mobile is the carrier's best handheld for communication addicts, thanks to its stability, e-mail verve, and its ability to make phone calls from any Wi-Fi hot spot.

Texting and e-mail fanatics on T-Mobile have been flocking to BlackBerrys ever since the Pearl came out, making the once-stodgy brand sexy. The Curve is a more grown-up Pearl, bringing a full keyboard but keeping (and improving) the camera, music, and video options that made the Pearl successful.

T-Mobile's Curve adds one key feature that AT&T's version of the same phone lacks: Wi-Fi with UMA—the ability to make calls over Wi-Fi. T-Mobile calls this "Hotspot@Home" and charges $10 a month; in exchange, you aren't charged for calls that begin on Wi-Fi networks. You can make calls using any Wi-Fi 802.11b or "g" network, secured or unsecured, that you can get access to. I connected easily using a ZyXel 802.11g router with WPA security, a D-Link router with WPA, at a Starbucks hot spot, and with a T-Mobile-supplied Linksys router. T-Mobile offers tweaked Linksys and D-Link 802.11g routers, designed to work particularly well with its system, for free through a rebate.

When I first tested Hotspot@Home in June, it had serious problems with dropped calls. I'm happy to say that with the Curve, those problems seem to have been licked. During testing, I dropped only one call out of more than a dozen while handing off between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and didn't drop any calls while staying on Wi-Fi. Much more often, I heard a momentary "pop" when transferring between networks. Call quality on Wi-Fi is generally quite good, too, and I got more than 8 hours of Wi-Fi talk time on one battery charge.

Setting up Wi-Fi is far easier than on competing smartphones. The straightforward setup wizard lets you scan for networks and enter your password; once you've saved a Wi-Fi network, it will jump onto that network whenever it can. Settings for T-Mobile Hotspots are preprogrammed into the Curve. On my tests, the Curve did take a few minutes, and occasionally a reboot, before it transitioned from EDGE back onto my home network, but moving in and out of a Starbucks hot spot went perfectly.

Don't expect Wi-Fi to greatly speed up Web browsing or e-mail. As I found on the 8820, the BlackBerry system is so optimized for slow networks that there's very little visible difference in the speed of Web page loading in the BlackBerry browser or e-mail delivery over Wi-Fi versus EDGE. Browsing, IM, and other Internet applications all work over Wi-Fi, no problem—they just don't work much faster than they did before.

Wi-Fi does seem to take one toll on the Curve 8320: It is generally a touch less responsive than AT&T's non–Wi-Fi model, with menu options taking a little longer to register. It still feels livelier than Windows Mobile, though.

The AT&T Curve is an excellent phone, and the Curve 8320 is the same. The earpiece and speakerphone are both loud, and the phone supports both Bluetooth and wired headsets. Call quality is generally very good as well, except for the occasional popping noises. The phone's VoiceSignal voice-dialing system requires no training. Battery life isn't awesome, but it's fine. I squeezed at least two days' worth of ordinary use.

The BlackBerry e-mail system is still unmatched. I set the service up with Gmail, Microsoft Exchange Web Access, and Yahoo! Mail accounts within minutes. The e-mail system also supports attachments, displaying picture attachments, and PowerPoints, but it boils PDFs and other Microsoft Office documents down to text. Built-in IM clients let you sign into AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! IM, and Google Talk all at once and all in the background, though only your "mobile" AIM buddies show up.

The Curve is also the best multimedia BlackBerry, thanks to its 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth stereo support. The phone was able to take a 4GB Kingston microSD card to hold music and video, and it comes with Roxio software that automatically transcodes your videos into a format that works on the phone. The device also pops up as a drive on your PC, so you can drag music and photos on and off it. WMA, MP3, and AAC files of any bit rate worked fine, though the Curve doesn't support DRM music purchased from online stores. Playing video, an MP4 file originally encoded for an AppleTV re-encoded beautifully for the Curve and played in full screen without a hitch. A WMV file lost its lip sync during re-encoding.

An integrated 2-megapixel camera, with the usual weak flash, takes sharp shots, but you have to watch out when photographing in backlit settings or outdoors—a bright sky will force the camera to underexpose a darker foreground. Indoor shots were much more balanced.

There's still one glaring hole in BlackBerry's software lineup: a decent and affordable Microsoft Office document editor. While you can sync contacts, calendars, tasks, and notes with Outlook using the BlackBerry Desktop software on XP or Vista, and you can extract the basic data from Microsoft Office files received through e-mail, the only option for actually editing Word and Excel documents is Dynoplex's $100 eOffice. That may change soon when DataViz's DocumentsToGo comes out for the BlackBerry platform.

The Curve's stiffest competition isn't posed by handsets that T-Mobile offers directly; it's from unlocked phones such as the Nokia E61i and the HTC S710. The E61i has a better Web browser, and the S710 has Pocket Office. But if you're more of a communicator than a spreadsheet maker—meaning that you live and die by phone calls, e-mails, texts and IMs—the Curve 8320 with HotSpot@Home will be your new best friend. That's worthy of our Editors' Choice.

SPEC DATA :

• Service Provider: T-Mobile
• Operating System: BlackBerry OS
• Screen Size: 2.5 inches
• Screen Details: 320x240, 65k-color screen
• Camera: Yes
• Megapixels: 2 MP
• Bluetooth: Yes
• Web Browser: Yes
• Network: GSM
• Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
• High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE
• Special Features: Music