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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BlackBerry curve 3g review

The camera on the BlackBerry Curve 3G is a pretty poor affair. When you launch the camera app, the only options you're offered onscreen are to zoom in or out, and take the picture.

To fiddle around with the (admittedly limited) options requires you to click the BlackBerry button and enter another of those text-heavy menus. Here you can play around with the white balance, picture size and picture quality, as well as opt for monochrome or sepia options if you're feeling a bit old school.

BlackBerry curve 3g: camera options

It's nice to have the sepia and monochrome options, we suppose, but they do smack of being token options, and almost highlight the limited amount of features the camera offers.

BlackBerry curve 3g: sepia

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BlackBerry curve 3g: monochrome

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To zoom in and out, you simply roll a finger across the optical trackpad – easy enough, but a mixed blessing.

If you want to take an image using the handset in a landscape position, then you can use the shutter button on the side of the handset, but if you're after a portrait shot then you must click the optical trackpad to take the picture.

Unless you're really quite firm with the button, you'll find yourself zooming when you already had the shot nicely framed up – something we found to be a real annoyance on several occasions.

Zoomed in images lose a lot of quality. Here you can see the same flower from three different zooms; the first is zoomed completely out, the second 3x and the third is zoomed in the full 5x.

BlackBerry curve 3g: zoom 1

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BlackBerry curve 3g: zoom 2

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BlackBerry curve 3g: zoom 3

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As you can see in the zoom images, the camera isn't too bad at handling colours when there's a big difference between them. But the red of the flower still comes out a little glassy, despite being taken in average daylight – bright but a little overcast.

Where the camera struggles with close-up shots (in the image below we hadn't even zoomed in – the fuzziness comes from a lack of autofocus) it handles long-shots much better.

BlackBerry curve 3g: close up

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BlackBerry curve 3g: long shot

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The images aren't massively crisp, either, which is no more than we'd expect from a 2-megapixel camera. Suffice to say, this isn't the ideal handset for shutterbugs.

The BlackBerry Curve 3G doesn't do too badly handling a lot of light. As you'd expect, it seeps into the whole image, but the dark areas do retain a suitable amount of contrast.

BlackBerry curve 3g: light and dark

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It's also worth noting that the 2-megapixel camera lacks the flash of the BlackBerry Bold 9700, so low-light photography is very much miss and not a whole lot of hit.

BlackBerry curve 3g: low light

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