After playing it cool for a few years, RIM has apparently decided that there's something to this touchscreen phone lark after all, releasing a budget all-touch device in the shape of the BlackBerry Curve 9380.
In the last few months we've seen a touchscreen added to the Bold in the form of the BlackBerry Bold 9900, an update to the Torch line in theBlackBerry Torch 9810, and a new, all-touch addition to the Torch family in the BlackBerry Torch 9860.
Now it's the Curve family's turn, even though we thought it was doing fine without touch in our BlackBerry Curve 9360 review. Instead of taking the Bold route and adding touch capability to the screen above the keyboard, RIM has been somewhat more aggressive with the BlackBerry Curve 9380.
The keyboard's gone completely, in favour of a 3.2-inch 360 x 480 touchscreen. This puts it far closer to the Torch 9860 than its Curve brethren on the outside, although it's rather more like the Curve 9360 when it comes to the internals.
Instead of the Torch's nippy 1.2GHz processor, the Curve 9380 ticks along at 806MHz, though there's a reasonable 512MB of RAM for multitasking. These power the new BlackBerry OS 7, as seen on all the latest handsets from RIM, and also featuring on the Bold 9790.
In its other internals, the BlackBerry Curve 9380 is very similar to the Curve 9360 (erm, do your best to keep up with the numbers, though nobody will blame you for getting a little confused). There's a 5MP camera with VGA video recording and an LED flash, Wi-Fi, GPS support, Bluetooth 2.1, microSD card support and NFC built in.
It's even essentially the same size and weight as the Curve 9360: 109 x 60 x 11.2mm and 98g - a total difference of 0.2 mm in depth and 1g in weight.
The Curve 9380 feels really light in the hand compared to the 150+g smartphones that are becoming the norm, but it doesn't feel cheap. Yes, it feels like plastic, but there's little give, and we'd trust it to survive a few drops.
From the front, the BlackBerry Curve 9380 resembles a smaller version of the Torch 9860, with the same glossy black front and silver edging. The Call, Menu, Back and End buttons at the bottom are part of the main plastic fascia, though, unlike the separate buttons of the Torch 9860.
This is, frankly, a mistake. They're much harder to press, and needlessly so. We know RIM loves its buttons, but it could have kept the same sleek look but made them far easier to hit by using touch-sensitive buttons. The optical trackpad has no such issues, however.
The BlackBerry Curve 9380's screen is nice and bright, with nice natural colours and excellent viewing angles. It is, however quite low resolution. It's actually got the same number of pixels as the Curve 9360's screen, but that was only 2.88 inches, compared to 3.2 inches here.
It's less than half the resolution of the Torch 9860, and is lower than theTorch 9810, which also has a 3.2-inch screen. The result is that icons and text are often noticeably pixelated, which makes for a less pleasant experience in the browser and apps like Twitter. It's still readable, of course, but just makes for a more underwhelming experience.
On the right-hand side of the BlackBerry Curve 9380 is the volume rocker with mute key, and the Convenience key.
Because of the small size of the Curve, we found the Convenience key to be slightly too far down, and a little stiff. Pressing it one-handed actually caused the phone to slip out of our grasp a couple of times. We'd prefer if it were slightly further up.
On the left side is the micro USB port, while the top houses a big Lock key built into the curved fascia and the 3.5mm headphone jack.
The rear is mostly glossy black plastic, which picks up fingerprints and grease at an alarmingly quick rate. At the top are the camera lens and LED flash.
You remove the back plate by finding the tiny little dent near the micro USB port and popping the back off with a fingernail. From there, you can add your microSD card slot, or remove the battery, where you'll find the SIM card slot.
BlackBerry OS 7 is on board in the BlackBerry Curve 9380, with is iterative improvements from OS 6. It's friendlier and more colourful than the default interface of previous BlackBerry OS versions, and retains the larger focus on touch interaction that OS 6 introduced.
On the Home screen, this is manifested in numerous areas that can be interacted with. The status bar at the top can be tapped to open several quick settings, while below is a notifications area that you touch to open your full notifications list.
By tapping the speaker symbol in the top left, you can switch profiles quickly, while the magnifying glass brings up a screen that enables you to search the phone for certain terms, or send the terms to the browser for an internet search. You can also perform voice searches, although the speech recognition is rather hit and miss, and is a long way from the accuracy of Siri on the Apple iPhone 4S.
The app tray at the bottom of the Home screen can be pulled up to reveal one, two, three or three-and-a-bit rows of apps at a time, or hidden completely. You'll have to open it all the way to be able to scroll through all your apps, however.
This is all presented pretty much identically to the BlackBerry Torch 9860, except that the different dimensions of the screen mean that you can't fit the full fourth row of apps on, as you can on the 9860.
You can swipe left and right on the app trays to access different arrangement of apps, such as Frequent, Downloads, Media and Favourites.
Overall, it's a system that sits somewhere in the middle of Google's Android and Apple's iOS when it comes to intuitive simplicity and customisability, and we like it. The only shame is that there are no widgets for those who like the have the app trays closed - it's just wasted space at the moment.
Alas, despite our fondness for the touch-optimised Home screen, there are many aspects of the BlackBerry OS that haven't had such care. Many apps still use small lists in their interfaces that were clearly designed for use with the trackpad on non-touch devices, with entries that are too small for fingers to select.
There is a trackpad on the BlackBerry Curve 9380 to get around this problem, but having to switch between using touch controls and the trackpad to control a phone isn't what we'd call intuitive.
There are also still irritating niggles such as text boxes or password entry fields appearing without automatically bringing up the keyboard. They're not dealbreakers, but show a lack of polish compared to Android, iOS andWindows Phone 7 devices.
Though generally we found the BlackBerry Curve 9380's responsiveness across the operating system to be acceptable, if hardly super-zippy (which is to be expected for a lower-end phone, to a degree), we did find that it flaked out on us really badly at one point.
It became impossible for us to scroll through any lists or web pages without accidentally selecting things in them. It caused us to accidentally follow people on Twitter, it made it a nightmare to reflow text in the browser, and just browsing through our list of apps became a Herculean chore.
It persisted overnight, but a restart of the phone eventually sorted it out. Though it was undoubtedly an unusual incident, the fact that such a glitch made the phone nearly unusable just during our review period, let alone the two years you might have this phone on contract, is pretty unnerving.
And we have to finish with a final major problem - one that we picked up on in our Torch 9860 review but that persists here. In one app's password field, the autocorrect function is active, not only causing your passwords to go wrong if they aren't normal words, but also overriding the asterisks and revealing your password to the world until it's dismissed.
(Disclaimer: The above picture is from the Torch 9860, due to problems getting a screengrab on the Curve 9380, but the problem is identical.)
RIM is a company obsessed with security, so we're amazed that such an obvious security issue is allowed by the operating system.
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