Finally, here is a BlackBerry everyone can afford
If the prices scared you away from owning a BlackBerry, your wait is over. The 8520 Curve, launched last week, thankfully costs just Rs 15,990, though available only on Airtel for now.
And it’s not just the price. Over the years, the BlackBerry had moved on from the side scroller to a trackball in the middle; now it has taken another leap of faith and switched to a track pad. Plus, the 8520 is 3.9 gram lighter than the lightest BlackBerry.

So what is good and what is bad about the new 8520? First, there is no 3G, (remember the Bold was 3G, the Javellin Pearl 8900 was not), the 3.2 megapixel Accurate camera of the 8900 has been replaced by a 2 megapixel in the new one. The new 8520 is thicker by 0.4 mm than 8900, and the 5.5-hour battery has been replaced by a 4.5-hour battery— with up to 17 days of standby time. The GPS and BlackBerry Maps features have been done away with, which means no geotagging for photographs. The 480x360 screen of the 8900 has been replaced by a 320x240 LCD, but at a bigger at 2.46”.

While I am not sure a lot of people use the mediaplayer on their BlackBerrys, the 8520 has dedicated keys to help you play music, pause to talk and skip tracks. You can easily mute a call with a dedicated button.
There is also a 3.5-mm stereo headset jack and BlackBerry Media Sync, which makes it easy to quickly sync music from iTunes and Windows Mediaplayer. However, RIM says the unit won’t play some music files. The 8520 has an expandable memory card (microSD / SDHC) slot next to the battery and supports 16 GB of memory— 32 GB when the new cards come out.

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