mttcee
1st January 2009, 08:23 PM
Hey guys, bought finally a Blackberry Javelin (Curve 8900) and want to share my initial impressions. Maybe of interest for you because you like the BB form factor in general. I think the classic Blackberry form factor employed in all wide BBs, the BlackJack and the Excalibur is the best form for a phone.
Had Blackbarrys from my company for years, then the BlackJack great phone with worse speaker quality (very low volume) more than a year, tried the Excalibur now as I wrote in another post. Great phone with excellent xda-dev-support. But still some weaknesses. So I bought the Javelin in a weak moment:
Pros
- Excellent hardware & build quality, small, tight, solid, round, smooth, much better than the bold which has its name for a good reason. Better materials than most phones.
- The keyboard rocks. No other keyboard matches this keyboard, even better than the Bold because less finger movements required. The old Treos come very close (680, 750). Perfect form, space within keys and hub => short and crisp hub. Blackjack was too hard to press, Excalibur too long hub and wobbly feeling, Treo to round, but similar crisp hub and space between keys.
- The trackball, so precise and fast, EPIX could match, but the software implementation of the touchpad isn't on par with RIMs trackball implementation.
- Great screen, not the Touch Diamonds resolution but it's near
- Great UI, really!. After a days you understand how many thoughts the RIM engineers made, e.g.: the Media Player is despite keylock fully accessible, shortcuts everywhere like R for reply, overall you are pretty fast with the OS.
- Slick and unobtrusive GUI design
Cons
- No ActiveSync OTA only expensive BIS/BES service
- No xda-dev community instead somehow weird BB forums
- Feels somehow closed/undocumented like a black box, couldn't get Google Maps to work, maybe because of missing BIS/BES service
- Browser is for a BB browser very, very good but doesn't match latest Opera on Touch Diamond.
- A2DP sound quality good but cannot be tweaked to the max as with WM devices.
- No 3G but EDGE
If you ask me to choose one phone, I couldn't decide for one (currently the Javelin and the Touch Diamond, because there's no up-to-date WM phone with BB form factor). Overall the WM phone is capable of everything and a lot of stuff can be done a little better (e.g. A2DP quality tweaking) and the UI of WM6 plus Touch Flow isn't that bad. The Javelin is a rock-solid experience, hardware and software are seamlessly put together, better than by the iPhone done. I miss some features with the Javelin but at the end of the day the core and few non-core phone features like cam and media are prefectly realized. At the moment I use both phones with multiple SIMs depending on my mood.
Had Blackbarrys from my company for years, then the BlackJack great phone with worse speaker quality (very low volume) more than a year, tried the Excalibur now as I wrote in another post. Great phone with excellent xda-dev-support. But still some weaknesses. So I bought the Javelin in a weak moment:
Pros
- Excellent hardware & build quality, small, tight, solid, round, smooth, much better than the bold which has its name for a good reason. Better materials than most phones.
- The keyboard rocks. No other keyboard matches this keyboard, even better than the Bold because less finger movements required. The old Treos come very close (680, 750). Perfect form, space within keys and hub => short and crisp hub. Blackjack was too hard to press, Excalibur too long hub and wobbly feeling, Treo to round, but similar crisp hub and space between keys.
- The trackball, so precise and fast, EPIX could match, but the software implementation of the touchpad isn't on par with RIMs trackball implementation.
- Great screen, not the Touch Diamonds resolution but it's near
- Great UI, really!. After a days you understand how many thoughts the RIM engineers made, e.g.: the Media Player is despite keylock fully accessible, shortcuts everywhere like R for reply, overall you are pretty fast with the OS.
- Slick and unobtrusive GUI design
Cons
- No ActiveSync OTA only expensive BIS/BES service
- No xda-dev community instead somehow weird BB forums
- Feels somehow closed/undocumented like a black box, couldn't get Google Maps to work, maybe because of missing BIS/BES service
- Browser is for a BB browser very, very good but doesn't match latest Opera on Touch Diamond.
- A2DP sound quality good but cannot be tweaked to the max as with WM devices.
- No 3G but EDGE
If you ask me to choose one phone, I couldn't decide for one (currently the Javelin and the Touch Diamond, because there's no up-to-date WM phone with BB form factor). Overall the WM phone is capable of everything and a lot of stuff can be done a little better (e.g. A2DP quality tweaking) and the UI of WM6 plus Touch Flow isn't that bad. The Javelin is a rock-solid experience, hardware and software are seamlessly put together, better than by the iPhone done. I miss some features with the Javelin but at the end of the day the core and few non-core phone features like cam and media are prefectly realized. At the moment I use both phones with multiple SIMs depending on my mood.