BlackBerry Curve 8900 to Be Released By T-Mobile

It's coming and it's coming soon...well, probably. Unless BlackBerry has one of their notorious deadline postponements, you should be able to get the BlackBerry Curve 8900 from T-Mobile as early as Wednesday. The new Curve is thinner than any previous iteration of the device which already held the distinction of being the slimmest BlackBerry with a full QWERTY keyboard.



The most striking feature of the new Curve 8900 is the 2.4-inch display screen. Its 480 x 360 pixel resolution beats the BlackBerry Bold and the Apple iPhone 3G. It also surpasses those two standard setters with its 3.2-megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom, auto-flash and auto-focus. The camera also serves as a video recorder.

Strangely omitted from the Curve 8900s feature set is compatibility with T-Mobile's 3G high-speed network. It's difficult to know why the feature would not be included in a smartphone of this caliber. True, 3G for T-Mobile is a hit and miss situation...some places have, some don't. But if T-Mobile wants to solidify its role as a 3G player, a new top end device should be equipped with it. There are arguments about 3G requiring more battery power and therefore a larger battery but that point is easily outweighed by the need for data speed.

Be that as it may, this is still a terrific new phone. It has both Wi-Fi and GPS unlike so many BlackBerries which have offered one or the other. Despite the absence of 3G, Wi-Fi makes high speed data access available at a hot spot or home or office that have the connection. The device comes with BlackBerry OS 4.6 so it features a better browser than previous Berries and also supports full HTML email supporting embedded images and active hyperlinks. It also comes equipped with the Documents To Go Standard application from DataViz so Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents can be edited.

The new Curve 8900 will be available from T-Mobile for $199.99 with a qualifying 2-year contract.

Check back on the smartphone review site for our upcoming review of the Curve 8900. For more tech news, follow these blog posts:

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