BlackBerry Curve 9360 review: Up and about

Poor 5 megapixel camera

The BlackBerry Curve 9360 comes with a 5 megapixel camera which is, still the highest resolution you can get from a RIM smartphone. To make it worse, it's a fixed-focus unit so close-range shots (like say documents) are hardly its element.

The camera comes with the same unattractive interface and relatively low number of customizable settings. What’s even worse is that the bar at the bottom covers a part of the frame, making proper framing a really hard task.

The Bold 9900 camera interface

The camera key is also pretty uncomfortable, considering that you do most of your shooting with the Curve 9360 in portrait mode. Still you can always use the trackpad to take a picture.

Geotagging, flash and scenes can be accessed straight in the viewfinder and those are just about the only options you get with the Curve 9360. The only other thing you can customize is image resolution, which is located in the advanced settings menu.

There are no settings for exposure compensation, white balance, ISO or anything like that. There is face detection, but that is a dedicated scene, rather than a separate setting.

The image quality of the BlackBerry Curve 9360 is a mixed bag. The contrast is OK, but the combination of low detail and high levels of noise pretty much ruins the pictures. They will surely do for your Facebook wall, but that's all they are usable for.

Here go several samples so you can judge the image quality yourselves.

BlackBerry Curve 9360 camera sample photos

Photo quality comparison

We’ve also added the BlackBerry Curve 9360 to the database of our Photo Compare Tool. You can see the Curve 9360 does surprisingly well in studio environment rather than in the live shots. All the charts quality is above average with good amount of detail and the noise levels are kept low enough. Still this won’t do you much good in reality.

BlackBerry Curve 9360 in the Photo Compare Tool

Uninspiring VGA video recording

The BlackBerry Curve 9360 records VGA videos at 30 fps and the camcorder's user interface is pretty much similar as the still camera.

Camcorder UI

The video quality is pretty high – the frame rate is good, the resolved detail is adequate, the noise levels tolerable, the colors accurate and the contrast is fine too. We really can’t find anything wrong with the videos, something we didn't quite expect after the disappointing still shots.

Here’s a VGA video sample from the Curve 9360 camera.

Great connectivity

The BlackBerry Curve 9360 is giving you a broad range of connectivity options, as you would expect in a modern day smartphone.

The quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support secures global roaming and the tri-band 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2.0 Mbps HSUPA gives you the extra speed. The Wi-Fi b/g/n support is another nice addition with an easily customizable Wi-Fi manager taking care of all the connections. Wi-Fi hotspot is also available. Bluetooth with A2DP support rounds off the list of wireless connectivity options.

The BlackBerry Curve 9360 is also equipped with a standard microUSB port that is enabled for both data connections and charging. Once connected, you can sync your data with the BlackBerry Desktop Software. It allows you to sync your iTunes collection, save for the files that have DRM.

The Curve 9360 is NFC capable too. You can pair it with other NFC-enabled devices and NFC accessories as well as read NFC tags.

Finally, you have the option to use your microSD memory card slot for file transfers.