After recently releasing their BlackBerry Bold lineup of smartphones with a total touch screen driven navigation system, RIM returns the BlackBerry Curve 9370 to a more familiar form factor. The QWERTY keyboard located beneath a smaller display that is usually on board smartphones these days redelivers the physical design that made the BlackBerry so popular with email-checking and text-crazy CEOs and other busy business executives to begin with. With individually spaced keys, this makes for a text intensive smartphone that can handle lots of data input.
The release date of the BlackBerry Curve 9370 was slated for late September in Canada, with the US to follow within the next couple of weeks. The 9370 is a world capable handset, with the ability to receive both CDMA and GSM signals. There is also talk of contractual availability through Verizon or possibly some other American cellular carrier. The BlackBerry Curve 9370 will run on RIM’s most recent operating system, the BlackBerry 7 OS. The new WebKit browser is also present, which RIM claims is 40% faster than the BlackBerry 6 OS browser.
NFC (Near Field Communications) capability is built into the handset, and the familiar optical mouse and touch pad are present for navigation, as well as the aforementioned QWERTY keyboard. The 2.44 inch display uses TFT touchscreen technology, and delivers 480 x 360 pixel resolution. Talk time runs 5.5 hours on a single charge with the 1000 mAh battery. The BlackBerry Curve 9370 measures 4.29 x 2.36 x 0.43 inches (109 x 60 x 11 mm) and weighs 3.49 oz (99 g), and in both of these regards is smaller than the average smartphone.
A single core 800 MHz processing chip joins 512 MB of RAM memory on the software side of the 9370, and as mentioned above, the new BlackBerry 7 operating system is on board. A 5 megapixel camcorder provides video and still shot recording, and has dual LED flash, digital zoom, preloaded scenes, and image stabilizer, face detection and other customizable features. Recording is presented in 640 x 480 pixel VGA quality.
A microUSB port is available for charging the handset and connecting to other devices, and a microSD slot is available for storage expansion. Both Bluetooth stereo and Wi-Fi b,g,n connectivity are offered, and a 3.5 mm headset jack is built into the BlackBerry Curve 9370. Compatibility with RIM’s Bridge feature which allows access to computers and data wirelessly through a BlackBerry handset is also present.
