Before Android & iPhones were popular, there were only a handful of players that were dominating the phone industry. One among them was the Canadian smartphone maker, BlackBerry. While its phones are non-existent today, just as the original Nokia brand that vanished from the market, back in the 2000s, BB phones were really popular. In fact so popular that BlackBerry’s Curve models outsold the iPhone back in 2009. For Q1 2009 in the US, BlackBerry had three models in the top 5 best selling phones list, with the other two being the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 aka HTC Dream (this was the first ever Android phone and we have a special throwback here). It’s rather funny to see how things have changed now. Android smartphones and iPhones dominate the smartphone market, while BlackBerry is nowhere to be seen.
BlackBerry Curve reached out to a really large set of users with its competitive pricing and a full-sized QWERTY keyboard. In fact, the BlackBerry 8320, which was quite a popular model in the series was the smallest and the lightest BlackBerry phone to feature a full-sized QWERTY keyboard back then. The keyboard was really cool, which made every BlackBerry phone a texter’s dream! The BB 8320 came with support for instant messengers like Gtalk, Yahoo, Windows Live, & AOL which kept its users ahead in their social game. Not to mention, BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) was a really big hit back in the late 2000s. Being exclusive to BlackBerry phones, BBM users seemed to have a different social circle altogether!
The phone came with Blackberry’s iconic trackball navigation which made browsing through the UI a breeze. It had Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth 2.0. Wi-Fi, in particular, wasn’t a common feature among BlackBerry phones, so the 8320 stood out. Further, the phone came with a 2MP rear camera. It wasn’t a good camera but then BlackBerry was never a fan of adding cameras to its smartphones. So to see even a 2MP sensor on the back of a BlackBerry phone was a big deal back then.
Other features of the device included a 3.5mm headphone jack, MicroSD slot, GSM/ Edge support (yes, no 3G despite iPhone featuring it!), and an inbuilt MP3 and MP4 player.
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The BlackBerry Curve 83XX series didn’t have a fancy processor, an amazing camera or even 3G. But the 8300 series models featured a full-sized QWERTY keyboard, a compact lightweight design (which didn’t bother you when you talked on the phone for hours), and a solid messenger client which kept you ahead in your social game.
Later models in the BlackBerry Curve series saw a shift from the traditional trackball to an optical trackpad. For example, the Blackberry 8530, which was yet another popular model in the series, featured an optical trackpad. It continued with the QWERTY keyboard design as its predecessors along with a 2MP camera. Even the battery life was as terrible as the older models.
By 2011, BlackBerry decided it was time to introduce full touch screen models in the Curve series. So the Curve 9380 finally ditched the QWERTY keyboard for a 3.2″ display with 360×480 pixels. After experimenting with touch, there were a couple of QWERTY models in the Curve series like the BB Curve 9320. But after that, the Curve series pretty much came to an end.
So did you ever use any of the BlackBerry Curve series models? How was your experience?
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