The BlackBerry Curve smartphone is a pretty regular sight in the hands of South African users. For many users, the BlackBerry Curve is almost the first logical jump from the average feature phone into the world of smartphones.

Even though RIM (Research In Motion) might have been in a lot of trouble in recent months, I have always had a healthy respect for the BlackBerry Curve. In fact, the 2 year old BlackBerry Curve 8520 was still Bandwidth Blog’s choice for the “cheap and cheerful” gadget category in our favourite stuff of 2011. And the 9300 has always a good deal as well, and a logical jump up from the 8520.

While much of the smartphone world and technology press is focused on the high end smartphone market, BlackBerry has quietly built a huge following in the developing nations with their BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) service. R60 a month is a mighty good deal for anyone who cannot have regular access to the internet.

The new BlackBerry Curve 9360 replaces the older BlackBerry Curve 9300, and aims to still keep its cheap price. But can it convince users to not jump ship to other brands?

Build and Design (more…)

Despite increasing pressure on the BlackBerry brand and worldwide sales decreases, the BlackBerry brand is stronger than ever in Africa. BIS is still a very compelling deal in SA with its high data prices. But Blackberry’s App World still has very few apps, which was one of our primary criticisms against our recent review of the otherwise brilliant BlackBerry Bold 9900.

South African developers are also slow to adopt BlackBerry, as the choice of apps might suggest. But still we think it is necessary to focus on some the good Made in SA BlackBerry apps, scarce as they might be. Here is our favourite South African developed BlackBerry apps.

1) News24

There are only a few app developers in SA who cater for multiple mobile app platforms, and News24 is one of them. While the app is by no means as sexy as the iPhone and Android versions, it is functional and stable. Using a similiar structure to the other News24 apps, the app also focusses more on weather with a quick 3 days summary of upcoming weather. Users can also check Lotto results, but cannot seem to see comments, just like with the iPhone and Android. As many would agree, it is sometimes more interesting to see people’s comments on article than the article itself. Maybe we can see this in future.

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Research In Motion today announced that the BlackBerry Curve 9360 will be available from MTN, Vodacom and CellC.

“The BlackBerry Curve series is already incredibly popular in South Africa and we think customers will be very impressed with this new model and with the new BlackBerry 7 operating system. The BlackBerry Curve 9360 makes it easier than ever to stay socially connected and offers a significant performance boost with a much faster and smoother web browsing experience,” says Rui Brites, Director of Product Management for Africa at RIM.

The new BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphone is ergonomically designed with a comfortable and iconic keyboard for fast, accurate typing and an optical trackpad for easy, one-handed navigation. GPS and Wi-Fi support are also included, as well as a 5MP camera with flash and video recording so that memories can be captured and instantly shared on social networks. The microSD/SDHC slot supports up to 32 GB memory cards for additional media storage.

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If you have ever needed convincing that manufacturers are finally fully switching to touch screens, this is it. The latest (cheaper) BlackBerry Bold, the 9790, will now also sport a touch screen and keyboard similiar to the Bold 9900 (which we loved). What is perhaps more interesting is that the new Curve 9380 will be touch only.

RIM has had a bad history with touch-only devices. The Storm and Storm 2 were big failures, despite sporting “clicky” touch screens that was supposed to simulate the feedback of a keyboard, but with a touch screen. Turns out BlackBerry users are quite attached to the their keyboards, so this is indeed a risky move for RIM to try a third time with an all touch device. Maybe it is third time lucky? Specs are pretty scarce right now, with RIM only stating a “brilliant 3.2 inch display” and 512 MB of internal storage. You might want to upgrade that with MicroSD card. Update: Turns out it runs a 800MHz processor.

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RIM, and the Blackberry brand, has been having a tough few months recently. They had the worldwide service outage, and the Blackberry brand has been having a tough few years trying to keep up with other handset makers. But after years of playing catch-up, the Bold 9900 looks to change that.

Modern smartphones have all switched to touch screens, which has made things difficult for RIM. Blackberry fans are typically quite picky about one thing – the keyboard. While the Torch 9800 did a good job of combining a touch screen with a keyboard, there was always a few fans out there who stubbornly chose the Bold for its keyboard–focussed design. But the Bold 9900 has the best of both worlds. You can just use the keyboard, or run it primarily using touch (except for text entry).

RIM also decided to let go of the staid, boring designs of most Blackberry devices, and blessed the 9900 with some great looks that will put most smartphones to shame.

So, is this the ultimate Blackberry?

Design and Build:

In a word: Stunning.

And no, I am not a crackberry addict. I am fairly picky about the way high end phones should be put together, and the Bold 9900 looks and feels great. If you are someone who likes their phones to ooze class, the Bold 9900 might suit you perfectly. The Bold 9900 has a great looking brushed steel edge which lends an incredibly solid feel to the device. The front’s top half is dominated by the capacitative glass screen, and the bottom is home to a great feeling thumb-keyboard.

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Are you a Blackberry fan, but the standard Torch and Bold is not exclusive enough for you? Today, Porsche Design and RIM announced the elite new Porsche Design P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry. Designed by Porsche Design, in collaboration with RIM, the luxury brand’s first smartphone really does have a high end look and choice of material, combined with the performance of the latest Blackberry Bold phones.

The Porsche Design P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry is instantly identifiable as a Porsche Design product. The exclusive material choices for this unique smartphone include a forged stainless steel frame, hand-wrapped leather back cover, sculpted QWERTY keyboard, and touch display. This customized Porsche Design P’9981 comes with an exclusive Porsche Design UI and a bespoke Wikitude World Browser augmented reality app experience. It also includes premium, exclusive PINs that help easily identify another P’9981 smartphone user.

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In the bigger scheme of things, the 5 days of Blackberry services outages after years of humming along is not that big a deal. It really is a tiny fraction of running time for a relatively stable system that has been very popular worldwide, but perhaps more significantly, growing in popularity in developing markets. The problem is rather that it could not have come at a worse time for Blackberry.

Blackberry has in recent months (or even years) been facing increasingly stiff competition on the handset front. Sure, their latest phones like the Torch and Bold 9900 are fairly good phones in their own right. But compared to the latest Android superphones and the iPhone, RIM clearly has a few challenging years ahead. When Apple was revolutionizing the mobile industry with a new finger friendly touch interface, RIM was still focussing on things like the loudspeaker’s quality. Different priorities…

But RIM had a plan – their loyal fanbase would stick to Blackberry’s great BIS service, which gives free web surfing and email for only a few dollars a month. And until now that seems to have gone the way they have planned. While first world consumers might have grown tired of the Blackberry handsets, the developing nations in the world have adopted Blackberry in a big way. And it is not the traditional enterprise client base – it is the super connected, price sensitive, social networking younger generation that needs their latest twitter timeline fix in between classes that is going for Blackberry.

So why is everyone so peeved off at RIM? Once again, 5 days is not a big deal. But in a developing world where your Blackberry is not your secondary internet device, BIS’s stability is more critical than ever. (more…)

Right now there are some reports that RIM is suffering major problems with its Blackberry Internet Service in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Users have been unable to access the web, instant messages through BBM or email.

Right now not one of Blackberry’s twitter accounts have admitted to the problem, with worldwide cellular operators rather sending out updates.

@vodacom tweeted: “BB is still having issues in Europe, Middle East & Africa. Waiting for an update from BB on a fix”. Twitter users have been quick to complain – although they needed to find another device to tweet from. Blackberry is trying very hard to promote its products against ever increasing competition Android and Apple iPhone, so this does not bode well for them.

We will be keeping an eye out for when everything is up and running again. RIM - you have some explaining to do.

Updated official statement from RIM:

“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa.  We’re investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved.”

Update: Blackberry services go down for a second consecutive day (11/10/2011)

Update: Official Statement from RIM after Blackberry services remain down for a third consecutive day (12/10/2011)

“The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure.  Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible.  We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed.”

Update: Official Statement from RIM  as Blackberry services return to normal (13/10/2011)

“From 6am BST today, all services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as India, have been operating with significant improvement.  We continue to monitor the situation 24×7 to ensure ongoing stability.  Thank you for your patience.”