BlackBerry Curve 9300 review

A quick and clever QWERTY-toting BlackBerry for the budget-conscious

The definitive BlackBerry Curve 3G review
The definitive BlackBerry Curve 3G review

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The internet browser on BlackBerry OS 5, which will be running on the BlackBerry Curve 3G at launch, is notoriously rubbish. It's slow to open web pages, even slower to render images, only offers one tab at a time and is generally a bit of a pest to use.

Although the screen puts in a valiant effort to display as much of the webpage as possible on non-mobile sites, it ends up offering you a birds' eye view. By which we mean a view of a load of coloured blobs on a screen.

BlackBerry curve 3g: web view

You really have to make good use of the zoom function in order to see smaller images and read any text. Zooming in to get a better view of text tends to be quite smooth, although we were often left with extremely jaggedy pixellated images after a zoom-in.

In fact, some websites rendered very pixellated, and even dedicated mobile sites suffered this same fate.

BlackBerry curve 3g: pixelly webpage

The optical track pad gives you more freedom to move the cursor around the web page than a D-pad would, although it did tend to be overly responsive, making selecting that tiny little link a real hassle.

It also comes in handy when you want to select text to copy and paste on the BlackBerry Curve 3G, as you can grab massive chunks of text in one quick swipe.

BlackBerry curve 3g: copy and paste

Sharing links is very easy, and is given as an option in the browser's menu. You have the option to send the link in an email, via SMS, MMS or BlackBerry Messenger. The other standard feature is the inclusion of bookmarks, and you can organise these by named folders to keep things tidy.

BlackBerry curve 3g: bookmarks