Review Of The Blackberry 8520

by Jack Allum
(Earith, England)

I decided to upgrade to the Blackberry 8520, and would give it a 9/10. It is a great phone with good features such as Blackberry App World, and Word to go, which lets you look at and edit word documents. Along with the word to go, it has sheet to go (Excel) and slideshow to go (Powerpoint).It allows you to connect to wifi networks, which allows for internet on the go - handy, especially if you need to check your emails.

On the subject of emails, you can set your phone up so that you receive emails from any email address straight to your mobile phone, and you can use up to 8 email addresses at any one time. It also has an optical trackball, which alleviates many of the problems with the much maligned Trackpad of the previous devices. The Blackberry 8520 also allows you to download mobile links to your device so you can just click on them and be taken straight to the website, the most popular of which are BBC News and BBC Sport.

The expandable storage which comes with the Blackberry 8520 is also good for storing music, videos and pictures, and you can use up to 8GB of expandable storage. The camera on the Blackberry 8520 is also better than many of its rivals, it is a 2 megapixel camera, although it does not come with flash. The Blackberry 8520 also allows you to send picture messages.

Getting onto the important subject of battery life; when you fully charge your phone, it has 5.5 hours talk time and up to 20 hours of standby, which is better than many of its competitors, most notably the iphone. Its also a good looking phone, and it weighs 106g with the battery in, and has a sleek all black finish to it, which is very smart.

What some people say about the Blackberry 8520 is that the QWERTY keyboard is difficult to use. This is not what I have found. In my opinion, I have found it very easy to use once I got used to it, and it only took a day or so to get used to it.

If you buy one of these, and you know someone else who has a Blackberry, then you can use a free feature on the phones called Blackberry 8520 Messenger, which is like MSN messenger. This allows you to talk to each other while on the move. This is a feature that could be seen as redundant though because there is a downloadable MSN app for the phone through Blackberry app world.

It is a quad band phone as well. This feature allows you to use your phone all over the world, whichever country you're in. This is a good feature if you're going away on business, or if you are just going overseas and need to take your phone with you.

Other features it has are USB 2.0 connectivity, and bluetooth connectivity which allow for seamless transfer of songs, pictures or videos.

If you are connected to a wireless spot, like the homehub I use at home, then it is possible to use that wifi connection to make a UMA connection, which means that it lets you make calls and send texts and emails with ease and speed at no extra cost. This is especially a good feature for me, because living in an area with poor signal can be frustrating at times. The UMA feature means that you always have perfect signal, until you go out of range of the wireless device.

For the social networkers among us (myself included!) this is a great phone because, as I have already mentioned, the Blackberry app world allows you to download links to websites like Myspace, facebook and MSN, and even my favourite social network site, TWITTER!:)

Overall, I would give this phone a 9/10, because it has all the features I want from a phone, along with the bonuses of good battery life and the sleek exterior styling. This is a phone you should consider getting.

I definitely will not go back to touchscreen phones like the Samsung Tocco, which I had before my upgrade. I would only go to a touchscreen phone such as The iphone, but I would have to take a long time to even consider moving away from Blackberrys!:)