Well, this one caught us by surprise. Research In Motion usually has a price tag of Rs 20,000 or higher on all their new BlackBerry handsets launched in India. So when a press release from Bharti Airtel landed in our inbox and said the new Curve 8520 would be available for Rs 15,990, it was reason for a double take.
The phone sports a 2.64-inch TFT screen (65K colours, 320×240 pixels) that offers the latest version of the wonderful BlackBerry OS. The popular ‘pearl’ trackball, however, is missing and has been replaced by a standard trackpad.
The full Qwerty keypad stays intact and holds 256MB of memory underneath. Of course, this can be increased by a further 16GB provided you have a microSD card of that size.
In a perplexing move, the handset is adorned with dedicated music keys. We say perplexing because a standard 3.5-mm audio jack seems to be missing! So RIM wants you to play your music, but just not use your own headphones while you’re at it.
The 2-megapixel camera on the back is not going to impress anyone, nor is the standard connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, microUSB port, GPS and A-GPS (with BlackBerry Maps). And no, there is no 3G on board.
For what can only be a phone targeted at the office-going professional, a reported talk-time of 4 hours and 30 minutes seems a bit less to us. Still, for that low price tag, we guess the company had to cut corners somewhere…
Interested readers can grab the handset from any Bharti Airtel showroom from August 7 onwards.