Switching to the Blackberry Curve 8530

INTRODUCTION

The following is a combination, "Why-I-Switched-to-a-Blackberry" Story/Review of the Blackberry Curve 8530. If you're already using a Blackberry or any other kind of Smart Phone this Hub probably won't be very useful to you. If you're considering switching to a Blackberry (or even a Smart Phone "in general"), or if you're interested in new-user experiences the following may be a little useful for you. If you're not interested in the whole, not-very-interesting back-story about the phone I was using before I got the Blackberry Curve you may want to skip to the third section here.

Oh, How I Loved My Old Phone, But Most Good (And Adorable) Things Must Come To An End

When it comes to Smart Phones, I'm pretty much someone who has ignored their existence since they first showed up in this world. For one thing, I've always been the type to say, "All I want is a phone that makes calls and doesn't cut out." For another thing, I've just kind of always assumed Smart Phones are for people with certain types of jobs that require non-stop contact and updating (or else for teens who have a lot of money to waste on gadgets).

I'm no teen, and I'm not particularly in the market to throw my money away (or to impress whatever friends I do see every few weeks). More key to the matter of Smart Phones, it's not that I'm not a busy person. It's just that I'm not a travelling person. To the contrary, I'm pretty much tethered to the computer desk in my home, which is also my office. I work primarily online (or at least at my PC). There are occasional phone calls, but let's put it this way: I don't see the need to hire an administrative person to answer my calls in the near (or distant) future.

I have a home phone and a few cell phones (one of which I occasionally lend out to a son or daughter who may need an extra for one reason or another). Then there's the "hotline phone" I have set up for one particular work arrangement. In addition to that, I have a basic business phone for long-distance and long-lasting calls, as well as faxing. It may not appear this way to you, but I've actually arranged my phone services in a way that's the most economical for my needs, as someone who has work and a family).

For the last few years, my personal and "main" cell phone has been a modest-but-adorable Pantech C300 (or some "3 number" like that). I'll admit that the only reason I bought this super-tiny phone was that it's adorable. (In fact, it was SO adorable my daughter, who also likes adorable little phones, bought one too.) It's not a fancy phone, and it has a kind of tinny sound to the ring-tones; but it's been dependable (and again, SO adorable). I've never been too thrilled that it's "titanium" in color, but it came out at a time when (unfortunately, in my opinion) a lot of phone manufacturers had stopped making a lot of black phones and started making them "silver". At the time, I longed for the days when phones in basic black were what was "out there", but the cuteness of this little phone made up for the fact that I hated its metal color.

This little cutey can hide in the palm of my hand, hang from a key-chain, or fit in my change purse. It's a camera (but an iffy one), but it does have a nifty "lantern" that's been quite useful. I've watched later model phones come out on the market and increasingly make my little, cute, phone seem on the obsolete side. Still, I've just liked it so much I haven't had any interest in newer and more impressive phones. Unless one of those new phones could match mine in cuteness and handiness I wouldn't be getting a new phone in the near future. At least that's what I thought. Then the battery on my Pantech started to show signs of "having issues" last October.

It was on Christmas that I mentioned to family that my phone battery was on its way out. Shortly after a family member handed me a printed out sheet with a place that had batteries at a good price ($18). I tucked away the sheet (still busy with post-Christmas "doings") and planned to find out more about the replacement battery later. At that point I did have to charge my phone more often, but it was still something I could live with. Right after Christmas I seriously injured my leg and pretty much stopped thinking about anything but the "leg issue". In the months following, the leg has continued to get better while the phone battery has continued to get worse.
I've continued looking at new phones online, and none of them appealed to me. Most of them are appealing enough - just not as appealing as the mini-phone to which I've grown so attached. (After all, it IS adorable.) The latest phones aren't aimed at being adorable. Most of them are aimed at being impressive. Some are aimed at being colorful. Lots are aimed at having the QWERTY keyboard. A few seem stuck in remaining "basic black" and functional. So, I just kept dragging my feet (particularly the one attached to the injured leg, of course).

Eventually, my little phone started to shut off willy-nilly once in awhile, but as it turned out it happened when it was most important it not happen. Things became more urgent at that point, but I still wanted to hang onto my little phone.

Getting With The Times - Reluctantly

Not long ago I started noticing ads for Blackberries in nifty colors. There's a dark purple that looks better than it sounds. I saw a great seafoam green (although that may not be the official name of the color). Some deeper reds look burgundy, one of my favorite colors and particularly attractive on a Blackberry. If there's one thing about advertising, it's that it works. I tucked in the back of my mind each of the most appealing phones for later reference.

Then, not long ago, there it was: A Blackberry Curve 8530 in smoky violet. This is another color that looks better in real life than it sounds. The online page showed the same model phone in black, pink, and the smoky violet. I would have thought I'd have liked the black phone (since I found the non-bulky styling and track key appealing), but it didn't look all that appealing to me. The pink one seemed to little girly to me. The smoky violet, however - not THAT appealed to me. Provided the picture was accurate in showing the color, this violet phone looked both profession and yet feminine to me. It was different without being too weird. Colors in the pinks, violets, and mauves are among my favorites; and the "smoky factor" of this particular shade of violet meant the phone didn't look like a purple jelly bean or otherwise look like a little girl's toy.

With a 30-day return policy, I decided to take a chance that the color was accurate and studied up a little more on the Blackberry Curve 8530. More than one review commented that this is a good model for a person getting his first Blackberry. A couple of reviews noted that this model "took polished and professional to a new level" (or something like that). More than one review included the remarks "feels cheap" (but I couldn't worry about that, in view of that nifty smoky violet color). After all, few phones look or feel as cheap as my adorable little Pantech; and yet I've managed to like that one a whole lot. It isn't that I wasn't concerned about the "feel-cheap" comments, but I've bought other things said to feel cheap; only to discover that one man's "feels cheap" is another man's (maybe more often a woman's) "nice and compact" or "not too heavy".

I have a lot of stuff that I carry when I go out. I don't need heaviness for the sake of creating the illusion of quality. I need something that works well.

There were reviews that noted the 8530 is less bulky than other models. It was noted that RIM included a track key (rather than track ball) on this model. Like a lot of people, I've never been a fan of track balls or anything that resembles them. Still, just seeing the track key mentioned made me worry about not liking that either.

This violet Blackberry, however, looked pretty appealing to me. In fact, it was the first phone that at all made me think about replacing my dying Pantech. (After all, I could get a new battery for it and be happy to live with the obsolescence that's already reared its ugly head in a number of ways.) If this violet Blackberry was as good as it looked in the picture (and, of course, if it worked well), I just might find phone happiness again.

Some Comments On My Experience With Blackberry Curve Thus Far

So, I got the phone. At only $29.99 (with a plan with Verizon) it was a great price. Yes, other companies are giving away Blackberries and other Smart Phones free with a plan, but I wasn't in interested in those other companies (not even the one offering that great seafoam green Blackberry), and I didn't want any of those other phones. If I were working out in an office each day, and if the phone were part of my work, I may think twice about the "image" of the violet (heretofore to be referred to as "purple" because it's easier) phone. For me, however, the color is professional-looking enough for someone who works from home and only occasionally goes out for business purposes. (Besides, when I have appointments I shut off my phone anyway and turn it on again after I'm outside the building again."

One of these days I'll write a complete review of my experience with the phone. For now, I'll just add a few things that quickly became obvious. First, I discovered that muddling my way to using this phone without reading the book was a whole lot easier than with a lot of other, less complex, phones (although I should say that I'm someone who is pretty good at muddling and not reading any books). (Does anyone ever read those books? )

One of the first things I did was to go online and find some of my writing. It immediately became clear that I can use the Blackberry to help organize a lot of the writing that, until now, hasn't been very well organized on spreadsheets and index cards. Sending samples from anywhere will be a breeze as well. With several personal and business e.mail accounts, I immediately set them all up with the right set of alerts on the phone. Suddenly I realized how handy it will be (at least for some of those accounts) to get immediate notifications of incoming mail.

It probably goes without saying that I set up the phone to easily get to the sites I most often use (for business, personal, and personal-business purposes). ("Hmm," I thought, "If nothing else, this will be great if I'm waiting anywhere and wishing I had something to do.")

I set up alerts from financial institutions (always a handy thing, especially for the person who gets several automatic deposits over the course of a month).

Then, of course, I loaded in the applications that are most useful to me, including local news and weather, national news, reference resources, and a number of tools to use in day-to-day life.

I discovered that a good number of the biggest companies seem to have Blackberry applications (although some have only applications for iPhone or other Smart Phones). Naturally, I made my way to videos and live news reports. It didn't take long, either, for me to find my way to a YouTube viewer and a local radio station (that shows the lyrics to songs if anyone is interested in seeing them, which isn't particularly one of my "things").

Neither did it take long for me to figure out that I can make plans with several members, via SMS, all at the same time (not the latest in technology, maybe, but a lot easier with the Blackberry than with other phones).

At first I was a little concerned with the teensy-weensy keys on the Blackberry (but as someone who does kind of like the simplicity of phones that don't involve sliding out a keyboard or otherwise swinging it out and swiveling it around), one reason I got the Blackberry was that it in many ways it's like a more conventional cell phone. When I first started to get acquainted with the phone I told myself people don't need to type a lot of things on that phone they may have had to type on another phone. I've since discovered that using the tiny keys isn't a big deal. Somehow, they're designed in a way that, in many ways, lets the user just type without having to worry about fitting his fingers on the keys the way that's required on, say, a PC keyboard or phone with larger keys.

The track key, it turns out, doesn't even feel like a key. It feels like magic. I had envisioned having to press one side or the other (or the top or bottom) of the flat key in order to get something to happen. Instead, it's just a matter of passing a finger over the key (almost like a touch screen).

I haven't yet bothered to pay much attention to the camera. I did take a couple of shots with it without really knowing how to work it. There were, of course, a couple of quickie shots of my daughter's cat. Those first two pictures were hardly Internet-worthy, to say the least. Then there were a couple of accidental shots of the bottoms of drying wine glasses and a few pieces of mail on the table. Pictures taken of family around the dining-room table on Mother's Day came out quite well. The light in the room wasn't very bright. I did take pictures of flowers in front of the grocery store. The camera seems super-easy to operate, and those pictures were Blackberry-wallpaper-worthy.

More useful to me than the camera, however, is the fact that this phone is also a Skype-Mobile phone. With both business and personal Skype contacts, I love the fact that I can now get my Skype calls on my cell phone (aka, "handheld", at least within the context of e.mail on the PC versus e.mail on the phone). I'd actually considered buying a WiFi Skype phone somewhere along the way. That won't be necessary now.

For those who don't already know this, the phone can be used as a tethered modem (via a cable) with a Notebook. I haven't tried this yet, only because - believe it or not - I only have so much time to spend trying new things with a phone.

It's great that the phone can, like so many others, play music and can be synched with iTunes, provided a memory card (purchased separately) is installed.

Of course one price for having this powerful little gadget is that the battery needs a little more attention than batteries on simpler phones. (It's kind of ironic that this is the phone I chose to replace my other one because of its battery problem, isn't it?) (That's something people may want to keep in mind if they're replacing a phone with a battery "issue".)

Since I'd already read ways to reduce some of the demands on the Blackberry battery, I've already set it so WiFi isn't on, Bluetooth isn't on, and a certain "level" of GPS isn't on. I've dimmed the screen a little, and made sure the backlight goes off in far less than one minute.
Also, I kept the applications to mostly only those I'll really use. (I did keep a couple of "luxuries" in terms of applications.)

At this point, however, the battery takes enough of my thought that I'm still kind of thinking of replacing the battery in the "cute-y" and keeping it as a back-up phone. Then again, maybe I'm just so "emotionally attached" to my adorable little phone I still plain, old, don't want to part with it; no matter how much I like the purple Blackberry. All I know, though, is that I don't want to always be having to think about batteries running too low. Of course, in fairness to the Blackberry, the battery doesn't drain so low, so soon, that it would really require all that much thinking about it. The book says to charge it regularly. It looks to me as if charging it once a day is all it would take, if that. It doesn't take long to get the battery to 100%.

There's a point where I don't want to get rid of too many applications in favor of battery power, because if I'm going to have a phone that doesn't do all those "nifty" things, why pay for a data plan and have a phone that I mostly only use for calls and checking e.mail?

This is a peace I've had to make with the whole Blackberry thing, and I've made it. I'm happy with this great little gadget which, by the way, is slim enough to fit in my billfold wallet. (There's one thing I've noticed and don't like, and that's that the screen gets fingerprints and smudges on it awfully easily. I'm always wiping it off, because on such a good-sized screen smudges and fingerprints look particularly disgusting.)

The Blackberry's desktop manager (the software installed on the PC) is easy to use. As with most gadgets, a CD comes in the box and pretty much guides the user in the right direction.

A WORD OF WARNING (at least for people not inclined to reads instruction books or instructions in general):

When it comes time to sync the Blackberry with the desktop manager, be very careful about not disconnecting the phone from the PC in any way. There's a warning that disconnecting the phone may affect how it works or even make it unusable.

I'll wrap all this up with a story (and a true story, at that). The other day we heard helicopters going over and wondered why they seemed so low. It turned out that someone had escaped from an institution not too far from where I live. Well, I'm alone here all day; and I have a grown daughter coming and going early mornings and late nights; so I wasn't too comfortable. I was able to keep up with news reports on the Blackberry, and I discovered that I can local news, e.mail, alerts from area police. I signed up for e.mail alerts because I thought I may hear as soon as possible if any more news developed.

And As The Phone Saga Concludes

No, you won't see me walking through airport, all dressed up in my best, professional, outfit and with a Blackberry to my ear. That's not my lifestyle. My lifestyle is about working mostly online, making not all that many business calls in any one day, and not needing to keep an eye on the markets. My lifestyle goes back and forth between the Internet, a few appointments, three kids, some other family members, and a few friends. Still, I've discovered that the nifty purple Blackberry suits my needs just perfectly. Also (and all serious matters aside), it's plain old fun to be able to watch YouTube on your phone!